Fear for herself, her son, and the nation prompted the empress to investigate a new, controversial method of inoculation that assured permanent immunity: the injection of matter taken from the smallpox pustules of a patient recovering from a mild case. This medical technique was being used in Britain and the British North American colonies (Thomas Jefferson was inoculated in 1766) but was shunned in continental Europe as being too dangerous. Dr. Thomas Dimsdale was a Scot and a Quaker whose grandfather had accompanied William Penn to America in 1684. Thomas Dimsdale himself, now fifty-six, had
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