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In 18th-century Turkey, inoculation was a common \u201cfolk practice\u201d, typically carried out by \u201cilliterate old Greek and Armenian women\u201d, Willett said. \u201cShe asked them about it and analysed it, and decided it was worth the risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
She managed to successfully inoculate her son while she was there, but her daughter was too young. The family then returned to England, where Wortley Montagu\u2019s enthusiasm for inoculation was met with suspicion and strong resistance from the medical establishment. \u201cWhen Lady Mary first came back, she didn\u2019t dare do anything [to her daughter]. But there was such a severe outbreak in 1721, she thought she had to take action.\u201d<\/p>\n
She then invited highly respected physicians and \u201cladies of distinction\u201d round to witness young Mary\u2019s speedy recovery from the infection. One of the physicians who visited was so convinced, he decided to inoculate his own son, which also went well. Young Mary soon became famous. \u201cNews reached Princess Caroline, who was the Princess of Wales at the time. She took up the cause and eventually the royal children were inoculated. Word spread that it was a good thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, not everyone was convinced. \u201cThe Whigs were pro-inoculation but the Tory party was really against it \u2013 a lot of Tories wrote about how it was interfering with nature and it was dangerous. It became very politicised.\u201d<\/p>\n\nLady Mary Wortley Montagu, painted by Joseph Highmore, got the idea for inoculation after seeing the practice in Turkey.<\/span> Photograph: Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSometimes people died from smallpox after the procedure, which had to be carried out very carefully to ensure only a small dose was administered. \u201cOften the gashes were too big.\u201d In Turkey, people knew they needed to self-isolate for a period after an inoculation, but in England the process was \u2018medicalised\u2019 by ill-informed physicians. They pointlessly purged and bled their patients during the inoculation, and then allowed people to walk around while they were infectious, unwittingly spreading the disease. \u201cThere was a lot of misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As controversy mounted, Wortley Montagu\u2019s reputation suffered and her argument \u2013 that the inoculation process should not be medicalised \u2013 was dismissed. One prominent physician, William Wagstaffe, bemoaned the fact that a practice performed by a \u201cfew ignorant women\u201d was being adopted in the royal palace, while Alexander Pope wrote venomous poems about Wortley Montagu, describing her as \u201cpoxed\u201d. \u201cHe knew people would know she was connected to smallpox, but by using the word \u2018pox\u2019, he was implying that she had syphilis. So that didn\u2019t help her reputation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Young Mary wrote that she remembers servants giving her \u201cdark looks\u201d and acting as if they were repulsed by her when she visited aristocratic families with her mother to inoculate the household.<\/p>\n
When Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine in 1796, by taking fluid from a cowpox vaccine and scratching it on to the skin of a young boy, he was building on Wortley Montagu\u2019s discovery, Willett said. \u201cShe brought a cure to the west. And that cure was developed into what we now think of as vaccination.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
As a child, Jenner had himself been inoculated against smallpox by doctors following in Wortley Montagu\u2019s footsteps. \u201cHe went through the whole purging and bleeding process and had such a grim experience that I think he thought: \u2018there has to be an easier way of doing this\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he realised that dairymaids never got smallpox, he \u201cmade the leap\u201d and thought of introducing cowpox pus into a scratch instead of smallpox pus. \u201cIf he hadn\u2019t been inoculated, then I don\u2019t think he would have gone on to think about vaccination,\u201d says Willett.<\/p>\n
Jenner had discovered a much safer way to confer immunity \u2013 and, unlike Wortley Montagu, as an educated male physician, he could publish scientific papers about his discovery and be taken seriously. He was later credited by Louis Pasteur as the discoverer of the first vaccine. \u201cOften in the canon of the history of science, women get overlooked,\u201d said Willett. \u201cLady Mary is one of those women.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Observer<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donna Ferguson, London,\u00a028 Mar 2021 A new book celebrates the trailblazing work of the English aristocrat, who successfully inoculated her daughter Edward Jenner administering a smallpox vaccine. He himself had been inoculated as a child by doctors following Lady Mary Wortley Montagu\u2019s ideas. Photograph: Getty It was a daring and dangerous experiment that paved the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11844"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11844"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11845,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11844\/revisions\/11845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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