This miraculous story, taken from The Great Night, about a boy with leukemia captures humanity at its most powerless, and somehow makes us laugh along the way. And that's just the first half! Her actions in the second half of the novel would make a strong case for mental illness. Thanks to her occupation she picks up a nasty case of gonorrhea, and after trying to cope with it for a while, she eventually heads to a hospital that specializes in prostitutes willing to repent. This slim historical novel is based on the true story of Mary Saunders, a prostitute in 18th-century London who is prone to violence when she can't have what she wants. Here, Keane picks the most inspiring, devastating and fascinating stories about disease as told through some of literature's richest stories, from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. In Fever, Keane brings the much-maligned Mallon-once known as "the most dangerous woman in America," back to life. Why are we so fascinated by illness? Mary Beth Keane's new novel, Fever, is based on one of the most notorious figures in medical history: Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary." The first person diagnosed as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, Mallon was presumed to have infected 51 people in her career as a cook before she was forced to live in isolation for the last three decades of her life-even though she herself was perfectly healthy.
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