Fever and the Nature of Acute Disease

The following excerpt is from Dr. Cowan’s book Vaccines, Autoimmunity, and the Changing Nature of Childhood Illness, and is reprinted with permission from the publisher. In November 1890, a twenty-eight-year-old surgeon named William Coley amputated the forearm of a young woman named Bessie Dashiell. A dear friend of John D. Rockefeller Jr., Dashiell was afflicted