In the eighteenth century one way of combatting small pox was
innoculation, David McCullough tells us in his thorough biography
of the often underprized second president, John Adams. The
innoculation consisted of opening the infected pustules of the sick, dipping a feather pen and cutting the innoculee and manually rubbing the poison in. The patients became quite ill and covered in pox, but they lived.
As an anecdote this tells us much about that rich period at the end of the eightennth century when our country came into being. It was a period of innovation, of savagery and of men
willing to take chances. John Adams qualifies for one and three. After he was thoroughly rebuffed by the French, he set off on his own with no prompting by the congress to enlist the financial aid of the Dutch. He was successful and procured thereby the first official loan made to the fledgling US govenrnent. As for taking chances during his presidency, he took it on himself singlehandedly to stop the war fever sweeping the country in 1797 by declaring that relations betwen France and the US were stable and there was no chance of a war. Unbeknownst to all he had received a letter from his confidante Eldridge Gerry, Ambassador to France, that such was, indeed the case.
Adams was an innovator and a man willing to take chances, a formula, you might suspect, for a short public life. But his impusles were held solidly in check by the book's heroine, Abigail. Intelligent, attractive and weiding a wicked pen, Abigail corresponds with John often twice a day. The art of letter writing is also on display in the book in as much as most of what we know comes from the elegant missives these Amercians wrote to one another.