“The small Pox! The small Pox!” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “What shall We do with it?” His worries were on target: the virus, not the British, stopped the Continental army’s drive into Quebec in 1776. In retrospect, Fenn told me, “One of George Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.
