When in 1716 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu left England for Constantinople, she had every reason to expect adventure; she was headed, after all, for the forbidding and exotic lands of the Grand Signior. But as the mission was all about her husband, the newly appointed Ambassador to Turkey, who had been charged with brokering a peace deal between the Ottomans and the Austrians, Lady Mary had no reason to assume that the episode would prove central to her life – that posterity would in fact remember Edward Wortley Montagu’s embassy to Turkey for the achievements of his observant, inquisitive and socially minded wife.
For when treaty terms were finally reached between the powers contesting control of the Balkans, at the Serbian town of Passarowitz in 1718, Edward was nowhere to be seen. To his lasting credit, he had proved himself rather too transparently turkophile to make an effective negotiator. That left the brilliant and formidable Lady Mary to make the name for herself, both for her Turkish Embassy Letters, published posthumously, but especially for her pioneering advocacy of inoculation against smallpox; where we tend to lug home backgammon boxes, kilim rugs or sack of dried mulberries, along with a few observations we might like to consider original, what Mary Wortley Montagu brought back from Turkey was nothing less than the principle of protection against smallpox, a principle which would be duly prove applicable to all contagious diseases.
In those lazzaretto days distempers, fevers and other contagious diseases were an ever-present threat, not least to travellers. There was the plague, of course, which the Wortley Montagu’s second cook – the ‘second’, typical of the detailing in Lady Mary’s letters, provides a delightful sense of scale – contracted after the party passed through several ‘most violently infected’ towns. But the fact that the cook promptly recovered, and after what the party mistook for ‘only a great cold’, convinced Lady Mary that the condition caused less ‘mischief’ than was generally supposed.
Not so smallpox, which was to Lady Mary’s age everything that Covid may be to ours. Lady Mary had personal experience of the dreadful affliction, which had carried off her favourite brother. She herself contracted the ‘speckled monster’ in 1715, escaping with her life if not with her much admired looks; the disease permanently scarred her face and deprived her of her eyelashes. No surprise, then, that this remarkable woman, so alive to all that she saw and learned in the East, was especially interested to discover that an effective protection against smallpox had been developed there. ‘The small-pox,’ she wrote a friend in the spring of 1717, ‘so fatal, and so general among us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it).’
Smallpox perhaps originated in India or Egypt – or China, where we find the earliest references to the practise of ‘engrafting’, latterly inoculation, or introducing minute doses of disease pathogen to confer immunity. We may take it that these treatments, like the diseases which preceded them, travelled the trade routes – the Silk Road – much as goods, technologies and ideas did; suffice to say that while the contagion had long since reached western Europe, the cure was barely known there when Lady Mary first encountered it in Adrianople, the Turkish border town of Edirne.
She described how old women of the region, each armed with ‘a nutshell full’ of smallpox scab or dried pustule, performed mass inoculations. The woman incised the recipients before injecting ‘into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle’. Lady Mary reported that the procedure caused comparatively mild symptoms, left no permanent scarring and that she knew of nobody dying from it. She professed herself ‘patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England’ where it was unknown, she supposed, because of the threat it represented to vested medical interests; where the doctors, that is, insufficiently virtuous to ‘destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind’, sought to protect their sales of quack potions and unguents by dismissing inoculation as an untested folk remedy of the barbaric Turk. Lady Mary was so convinced by the procedure’s efficacy that she even resolved ‘to try it on my dear little son’, which she successfully did the following spring.
In 1721, some years after the Wortley Montagus’ return home, England found itself in the grip of an especially acute smallpox epidemic. Lady Mary now opted to have her young daughter inoculated; several of the doctors who witnessed the procedure were so impressed by the girl’s rapid recovery that they duly had it performed upon their own children. Later that year Caroline, Princess of Wales, began to take an interest in inoculation. She arranged for the procedure to be performed upon six criminals sentenced to death at Newgate whose reward, were they to survive, was to be their freedom. The high-profile experiment attracted the interest of physicians, surgeons, doctors and apothecaries; the six prisoners duly recovered and, no doubt with a particular appreciation for the benefits of medical research, walked free from Newgate.
In 1722, after Princess Caroline’s two daughters were successfully inoculated, Lady Mary championed the procedure in an account, published under the pseudonym ‘a Turkey Merchant’, in a prominent London newspaper. Within years, inoculation was established; later in the century Edward Jenner would popularise the use of the milder cowpox to vaccinate – from the Latin vacca, for cow – against smallpox. But Lady Mary, lauded by the like of Voltaire in France, was not to be forgotten for her inestimable part in introducing ‘the great and noble blessing, Inoculation’, to Europe.
As we acquaint ourselves with our newly vulnerable state, aware that bugs can mean so much more than a night or two tucked up with a hot water bottle, we wait on the discovery of a vaccination for Covid 19. When that day comes, while thanking our lab-coated saviours, whoever they turn out to be, we should also remember all that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did two centuries ago – and the debt we all owe her.