Zabdiel Boylston, in my dreams
No portrait of Zabdiel Boylston survives, but this is how I like to imagine him…
The Turkish Bath by Ingres
Ingres’s painting of luxuriant nudity began as an awareness of absence. As a young man, the painter read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s dream of unscarred skin…
Smallpox: the “Speckled Monster”
Smallpox was a hideous disease that made its victims unrecognizably monstrous, and many died in agony. The terror it fueled was intense…
New Light on the Newgate Six
History may seem solid, but it changes as new facts come to light. Since I published “The Speckled Monster,” the trial records of the prisoners…
