http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/montagu-smallpox.html
In 1717 Lady Montague arrived
with her husband, the British ambassador, at the court of the Ottoman Empire.
She wrote voluminously of her travels. In this selection she noted that the
local practice of deliberately stimulating a mild form of the disease through
innoculation conferred immunity. She had the procedure performed on both her
children. By the end of the eighteenth century, the English physician
Edwardjenner was able to cultivate a serum in cattle, which, when used in human
vaccination, eventually led to the worldwide eradication of the illness.
A propos of distempers, I am
going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. The
small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless, by
the invention of engrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of
old women, who make it their business to perform the operation, every autumn,
in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one
another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they
make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or
sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of
the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately
rips open that you offer to her, with a large needle (which gives you no more
pain than a common scratch) and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie
upon the head of her needle , and after that, binds up the little wound with a
hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians
have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead,
one in each arm, and one on the breast, to mark the sign of the Cross; but this
has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done
by those that are not superstitious, who chuse to have them in the legs, or
that part of the arm that is concealed. The children or young patients play
together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the eighth. Then
the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom
three. They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never
mark, and in eight days time they are as well as before their illness. Where
they are wounded, there remains running sores during the distemper, which I
don't doubt is a great relief to it. Every year, thousands undergo this
operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the
small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.
There is no example of any one that has died in it, and you may believe I am
well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my
dear little son. I am patriot enough to take the pains to bring this useful
invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of
our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I
thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue,
for the good of mankind. But that distemper is too beneficial to them, not to
expose to all their resentment, the hardy wight that should undertake to put an
end to it. Perhaps if I live to return, I may, however, have courage to war
with them. Upon this occasion, admire the heroism in the heart of
Your friend, etc. etc.
Source:
From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters
of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e: Written During her Travels in
Europe, Asia and Africa. . . , vol. 1 (Aix: Anthony Henricy, 1796), pp.
167-69; letter 36, to Mrs. S. C. from Adrianople, n.d.
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© Paul Halsall, July 1998
halsall@murray.fordham.edu
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