Proofreading Blunders: Poor Bill Bryson

I don't claim to be perfect when it comes to matters of proofreading and editing.  I don't think anybody does or can any more, even the venerable Times.  Just Google am or pm (or AM or PM) someday to see how many varieties of common usage appear acceptable.  Language is an ever-morphing conceit and yesterday's consensus might be tomorrow's red flag.   I still think, however,  there's a place in this world for the Grammar Police (Thank you, Lynne Truss).  I just live in a bit of trepidation that they might set their sights on me.
     I'll admit as well that I don't hold everyone to the same standards; I wouldn't expect the local Baptist church bulletin to be edited with the same zeal as The Encyclopedia Brittanica.  That's why Seeing Further, a recent "history" of The Royal Society edited by the inimitable Bill Bryson is so frustrating.
     This is serious subject matter, encompassing as it does the birth of the scientific method  and the enlightened advancement of human thought.  And Bryson, for all his witticisms and gentle chicanery in previous books, is a serious student of both science and the English language, as evinced by his previous books A Short History of Nearly Everything and Mother Tongue and Made In America, both of which trace the evolution of our language.
     So it's quite a shock to catch some of the appalling mistakes printed in this otherwise fascinating book.  To use only one abject example here, in Margaret Atwood's essay on Swiftian influence upon the "mad scientist" genre, there is a discussion of the concurrent smallpox epidemics that broke out in London and Boston in 1721.  Cotton Mather, of all people, worked in concert with Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, to arrest the epidemic through inoculation.  Apparently Dr. Boylston knew a little bit more about human physiology than he let on because according to the proofreaders and editors of Seeing Further the good doctor visited the Royal Society in 1826 to read a paper on his findings, more than one hundred years after the epidemic.  It would seem Dr. Boylston had quite a good memory as well.
     Perhaps we shouldn't really pick on Bill Bryson and his assistants; grammatical and spelling errors occur all the time, right?  But honestly,  what about content and context?  There's just no good reason why such a glaring factual error should have made it into print, especially in such a book as this.
     This is the kind of thing that drives this gentle reader absolutely over the edge precisely because it should have been caught.  And it's the kind of thing that will be commented upon, here, every time it happens.  And, yes, nowadays it's considered acceptable to start a sentence with a conjunction.  Mostly.