Doctor Therne
1898
The novel that predicted our present moment. In 1898, H. Rider Haggard wrote a stark warning about what happens when science loses to superstition, and Doctor Therne remains disturbingly relevant. Dr. James Therne is a country physician haunted by the smallpox epidemic that devastated his town of Dunchester. He championed vaccination, but when the plague swept through anyway, the town turned on him. His daughter Jane is among the dead. Now, branded a failure and a murderer by the very people he tried to save, Therne flees to Mexico, only to find himself thrown into another life-or-death adventure on a brigand-plagued diligence, as if the universe were testing whether surviving one catastrophe qualifies a man for another. Written as a polemic against the anti-vaccination movement gaining traction in Victorian England, this is Haggard at his most urgent: part medical thriller, part moral reckoning, part adventure tale.
