Book - BookDetective

Name: Wickett's Remedy

Author: Myla Goldberg
Year: 2005
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Genres/categories:
Fiction, Historical fiction

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ISBNs:
9781400078127
1400078121

Lydia Kilkenny is eager to move beyond her South Boston childhood, and when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy Boston Brahmin who plans to become a doctor, her future seems assured. That path changes when Henry abandons his medical studies and enlists Lydia to help him invent a mail-order medicine called Wickett's Remedy. Then the 1918 influenza epidemic sweeps through Boston, and in a world turned upside down Lydia must forge her own path through the tragedy unfolding around her. As she secures work as a nurse at a curious island medical station conducting human research into the disease, Henry's former business partner steals the formula for Wickett's Remedy to create for himself a new future, trying--and almost succeeding--to erase the past he is leaving behind.

Alive with narrative ingenuity, and tinged with humor as well as sorrow, this inspired recreation of a forgotten era powerfully reminds us how much individual voices matter--in history and in life.
(back cover)