La variole

Massive anti-vaccination street protests. Resistance, sometimes armed, to public health measures, including attempts to isolate the sick. Poor communications. Rumour. Misinformation. False vaccination certificates. Hesitant or hostile politicians. Police unwilling to enforce the law. Quacks touting alternative medicine. Insufficient resources in place.

No, not the COVID‑19 crisis of recent times. Rather, Montreal’s smallpox epidemic of 1885, which killed 2 percent of the population. If history rhymes, this reissue of Michael Bliss’s account of that terrible moment in Canadian history, Plague, with a short foreword by Gerald A. Evans, an epidemiologist at Queen’s University, is half of a perfect couplet. The late historian’s page-turning narrative from 1991 sets the scene; Evans draws the parallels to today; our recent memories do the rest.

In the case of COVID‑19 vaccinations, much of the resistance was based upon both disinformation and...