Stu Levitan welcomes Madison author Stephen Coss, to discuss his all-too relevant book, The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics.

That fever was small pox, the infectious disease that killed, crippled or disfigured nearly one-tenth of all humankind in the three thousand years leading up to 1700, and in the 1600s alone killed about 400,000 Europeans every year. And on April 21, 1721, small pox returned to the largest town in colonial America at the time, Boston, which was also the third busiest seaport in the British empire. What happened next would produce a major advance in medicine, our first independent newspaper, maybe even help spark the American revolution itself.

It is quite a story, with a cast of characters that includes that scourge of Salem, Cotton Mather, an unhappy teenage printer’s apprentice named Benjamin Franklin, and the first populist politician in America. And it is a story with a profound paradox at its heart – it is the fundamentalist preacher who champions medical innovation and the iconoclastic journalist who attacks it for largely mercenary reasons, at least for a while.

Steve Coss was born and raised in Connecticut, earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia. He has worked as an advertising agency copywriter and creative director in Chicago, Detroit, and here in Madison, where he now works in marketing communications for CUNA Mutual. The Fever of 1721 was his first book. He’s now working on a novel that concerns the assassination of President Kennedy.

One disclosure – this interview was one of the first we did when things shut down in March, and we didn’t have a really good system yet for quality control on the sound. My audio in particular was pretty sketchy. So in addition to taping this new introduction, I have also taken the liberty of rerecording my questions, just to improve your listening experience.

With that, It was, and remains, a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Steve Coss.