The Plague Rider plunges you into a forgotten chapter of the American Southwest-when deserts were roadless, smallpox was a death sentence, and one unsung doctor dared to gallop straight into the epidemic's maw.

In December 1803, Basque-born surgeon Dr. Cristóbal María de Larrañaga receives a fragile vial of cow-pox lymph and an impossible order: carry living vaccine 1,400 miles from Chihuahua to the edge of the Rocky Mountains before it dies in the cold. With a mule train of orphan "courier" children, a scarred Navajo scout, and a midwife who trusts science more than saints, Larrañaga races against deserts, floods, Apache raids-and the ticking clock inside every blister.

His daring ride sparks the continent's first mass-inoculation campaign, slashes smallpox deaths in half, and quietly rewrites the rules of frontier medicine. Yet history forgot his name-until now.

Packed with true-life suspense, The Plague Rider reveals:

• A frontier thriller: ambushes, blizzards, river crossings, and a last-second amputation under open sky.

• A public-health origin story: lime pits, boiled-water "chants," and a portable Silent-School that outsmarted epidemics decades before germ theory.

• A timeless hero: a physician who put arithmetic before applause, saving 31,000 lives with nothing but grit, empathy, and a curved Basque needle.

If you loved The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or The Ghost Map, prepare to meet the frontier doctor who outran death-and discover why his forgotten pulse still echoes in every modern vaccine drive.