Colacurcio also links the physical smallpox epidemic to an equally infectious cultural epidemic. (courtesy of Dr. Michael J. Colacurcio)

In "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," the treatment of cultural disease begins, as always, in 'prayer and fasting'; but it proceeds directly to the task of 'waving the red flag of pestilence' in rhetoric and then in revolutionary fact, in the face of the party of infectious vice (448).