The Cow-Leech's Miasma Theory

About this book:

In the fog-choked hollows of 1847 Yorkshire, the cattle are dying. The bailiff calls it contagion. The London surgeons whisper of invisible animalcules. But Josiah Croft—known to every tenant from the dales to York as the Cow-Leech—knows better. He reads the sickness in the mercury of his barometer, the alignment of Mars in Scorpio, the greasy weight of an easterly wind that traps the putrefaction of the fens in the valleys where beasts breathe. Armed with forty years of almanacs, a brass fleam, and a conviction that the earth itself exhales disease, Croft wages a lonely war against the rising tide of modern medicine—and against a pestilence that may not respect his theories at all.

Atmospheric, sharp-tongued, and steeped in the mud and mercury of Victorian veterinary practice, *The Cow-Leech's Miasma Theory* follows a practitioner of a dying science as he battles a dying season. From the sulfurous ditches of Blackwood to the smoke-pots of Eldon, from the apothecary's ledger to the squire's prize bull, each chapter tightens the circle around a central question: when the air itself turns poison, is observation enough? Or will the next wind from the east carry something no almanac predicted?

For readers who love the rain-lashed intellect of *The Essex Serpent*, the period grit of *Quacks*, or the stubborn brilliance of a man arguing with the sky—this is historical fiction that breathes the very miasma it describes.