reviewer of the poem The Tale of Eyam in the British Medical Journal of 30 November 1889 comments on its poetic phraseology: "The author speaks of the pestilence and 'its hellborn brood'; and again of firebolts from 'heaven's reeking nostrils.' Such phraseology, says the unknown author, "aptly exemplifies the mental attitude of men who lived in the infancy of modern science, when in the plague they saw the angry stroke of offended Deity, and recognised the 'scourge' of God in what we know to be only the scourge of filth.' Shortly afterwards, writing in his A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1891), Charles Creighton, while affirming the account of what happened, questioned the wisdom of the actions taken at the revival of the epidemic in 1666 as mistaken, though well-meaning. Instead, "the villagers of Eyam were sacrificed...to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say was not scientifically sound," suggesting that they should have fled elsewhere as long as they didn't gather together or take "tainted" articles with them. A 2005 study of Eyam's story as history claims it is no more than a literary construct fabricated long after the actual events. Contemporary reporting was rare and often the result of political or religious bias. From the dawn of the 19th century, the romanticised and sentimental accounts of events at Eyam were "largely produced by poets, writers and local historians – not doctors", as is apparent from the dissenting opinions quoted above. The 1886 bicentenary commemoration, repeated annually for close on a century and a half, is claimed by the author to be the beginning of "an overtly invented tradition" which has spawned a heritage industry to profit the village in the face its declining prosperity and population, and provided instead "a plague tourism infrastructure". By contrast, the 2000 study led by Dr. Steve O'Brien suggested that a human gene mutation, CCR5-Delta 32, known to give immunity from HIV, may have helped the survivors at Eyam: "the timing is right, the numbers are right..." and their descendants had a higher than average percentage of the mutation. In addition the 2016 study by Drs. Didelot and Whittles acknowledged that Eyam was "important because it gives us fantastic data for the plague." They found that human-to-human transmission was far greater than previously thought and that the village's isolation did indeed help to stop the spread of