The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus by Lucy Ward is a fascinating--and timely--account of the way in which politics and science collided as Catherine the Great introduced smallpox inoculation to Russia. In 1768, Thomas Dimsdale, an English physician, traveled to Russia to inoculate Catherine and her son against smallpox, a procedure that most people feared, despite the disease’s ravages. Catherine, a great believer in the ideas of the Enlightenment, used her successful inoculation to spread the word about the importance of the procedure, a forerunner to vaccination that introduced a controlled dose of a virus to a healthy patient to prevent disease. This is a riveting history of one of the world’s first public health campaigns. (Non-Fiction)