The program to eradicate smallpox was always underfunded, encountered numerous obstacles from obstructionist, incompetent governments to floods, civil wars, famines, and droughts. It is a story that makes one believe that human beings are worth believing in.
Shocking True Story is a good, though by no means exhaustive or thorough, account of Confidential, Hollywood's publication of record for prurient interests.
Americans were more fully aware that modern life, urban life in the late nineteenth century, made heat more unbearable than ever. As Salvatore Basile writes in Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything: “America was realizing that a heat wave was much more unpleasant in cities than in rural areas: the larger the city, the more brick and stone and human bodies, the more hellishly hot it felt." A man-made heat was being created that could only be controlled, ultimately, by man-made cooling. Slowly, inchoately, but tenaciously, the quest for coolth had begun.