Podcasts of the Week Ending January 26

More Perfect (via RadioLab) :: Sex Appeal

How Ruth Bader Ginsburg convinced the Supreme Court to take on discrimination against women, by taking a case involving discrimination against men.

On the Media :: Rethinking MLK Day

The downside of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy in the African-American is how his idea of masculinity is used against women and anyone who doesn’t fit into the perception of respectability.

Hidden Brain :: How Science Spreads: Smallpox, Stomach Ulcers, And ‘The Vegetable Lamb Of Tartary’

This episode focuses on the way in which scientific ideas spread and how they are accepted within communities.  It focuses on the dissemination of misinformation, but also how it is a necessity that we accept scientific ideas without having individually tested them.  I was particularly intrigued to learn about Mary Wortley Montagu, who spread the idea of smallpox inoculation in 18th century England, around the same time Cotton Mather was doing so in Boston.  Rather unfairly, I hadn’t heard her story before.

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Running tally of Podcast of the Week appearances:

• The Anthropocene Reviewed – 1
• Code Switch – 1
• Fresh Air – 1
• Hidden Brain – 1
• More Perfect – 1
• 99% Invisible – 1
• The New Yorker Radio Hour – 1
• On the Media – 2
• Planet Money – 1
• This American Life – 1
• The War on Cars – 1
• What Next – 1

Book Review: The Fever of 1721 by Stephen Coss

Author: Stephen Coss
Title: The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics
Narrator: Bob Souer
Publication Info: Simon & Schuster (2016
Summary/Review:

I received a free advanced readers copy of this audiobook through the Library Thing Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.

1721 is a pivotal year in Boston history.  Coss details how a popular party of elected representatives challenge the rule of the Royal Governor establishing the ideology and some of the organizations that would be used by the Revolutionary generation 50 years later.  At the same time, The New England Courant is launched as the first colonial newspaper completely independent of the government’s imprimatur and challenges the political and religious leaders of the time.  Tying them together is an epidemic of smallpox and the effort of some learned people in the town to try to fight it using a new idea, inoculation.

There are five pivotal figures in this book:

• Elisha Cooke, Jr., the popular party politician whose election as Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representative leads to a showdown with Royal Governor Samuel Shute, who dissolves the House and calls for new elections.
• James Franklin, publisher of The New England Courant, who publishes opinions that scandalize the established elites and religious leaders of the colony, while also aiming for a more entertaining and literary journalism than offered by the two existing newspapers.  While generally on the side of reason against tradition and superstition, Franklin’s Courant comes out strongly against inoculation.
• Benjamin Franklin, James’ much younger brother and apprentice who educates himself with materials at the print shop and makes his first impression by anonymously submitting the Courant‘s most popular opinion pieces under the pseudonym of Silence Dogood.  Franklin, of course, is a direct connection to the Revolutionary period of the 1760s & 1770s.
• Cotton Mather, the conservative Puritan preacher and theologian, seeking redemption for his part in the Salem Witch hysteria.  Surprisingly he is also a man of science who initiates the call to attempt inoculation against small pox which he learns of from his African slave Onesimus and the writings of physicians in Europe.
• Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, a middling physician who answers the call to attempt inoculation and continues to do so despite strong opposition in the town and threats to his life.  Boylston ends up successfully inoculating nearly 250 people for smallpox despite being a provincial doctor with no formal training and doing so before anyone in Britain had attempted to do so.

While I was familiar with a lot of the aspects of this history, I found it fascinating how Coss tied them together and showed how they influenced one another and lasting impact on Boston and Colonial America.  It’s a fascinating and engaging historical work.

Recommended books: The Pox and the Covenant: Mather, Franklin, and the Epidemic That Changed America’s Destiny by Tony Williams,  Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore, and The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff
Rating: ****