The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.
In his History of England, Macaulay was writing about the late 17th century when, he said, smallpox was "the most terrible of all the ministers of death." But a mere 25 years ago,...
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