The Plague Rider: The Frontier Physician Time Forgot—and His Daring Ride to Save a Generation (The Californio Chronicles) - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

In 1805, the only way to carry the cure across the desert was inside a child's arm.

Cristóbal de Larrañaga first learned to hold a wound closed on the docks of a Basque fishing town, where the girl he loved died of a fever no one could name. He crossed an ocean and half a continent to become surgeon of the presidio at Santa Fe, certain that a man who counted carefully could save more lives than he lost.

Then smallpox reaches the far edge of the Spanish empire.

In a borrowed house beside the plaza, Cristóbal does what the friars condemn and the mothers fear: he gives the disease to children on purpose, believing it will spare them something worse. Most live. Some don't. And one small act, done in secret against a mother's wishes, will follow him for twenty-five years.

A quarter century later, the long-awaited vaccine reaches New Spain. The woman he left behind in Mexico City seals it between plates of glass and sends it north. To bring it home, Cristóbal must pass it from arm to arm, child to child, across the ninety waterless miles of the Jornada del Muerto. Then measles breaks out in the caravan, and a rumor rides north faster than the mules: that the surgeon carries the sickness along with the cure.

Based on the true story of the frontier surgeon who vaccinated 3,610 people in New Mexico in 1805, The Plague Rider is a sweeping, intimate novel about love that waits, faith that argues, and the cost of deciding for someone else. It moves from the docks of Zarautz to the dissecting rooms of Mexico City, from a Comanche camp on the open plains to a courtyard where a blue bowl still catches the rain. It asks what a healer owes the people he cannot save.

For readers of Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders, Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water, and Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever.

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