The smallpox came in the mail, in a little piece of 350-year-old human skin. And the surprise discovery is dramatically rewriting the history of one of the most notorious diseases to plague humankind.

In Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel for young readers, a girl in Boston must survive a dangerous smallpox epidemic—and ...

Smallpox was followed by influenza, measles, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases, each of which Australia’s Aboriginal people had no resistance to. This cocktail of diseases Europeans first ...