A doctor makes his career on an anti-vaccination platform, wins a seat in Parliament on it, and is in office when smallpox comes to the town. Haggard wrote this in 1898 as a deliberate polemic, and it is the only book of his with no adventure in it at all. The last chapters are as grim as anything he wrote, and he meant them to be. Fifty-five plates, among them Thomas Eakins, range across portraits, rowing scenes and public figures from 1871 to 1926, matching a novel where private conscience becomes a matter of public record.
