Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY

The celebrated eighteenth-century poet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), merits a place in public health history for her early advocacy of the practice of smallpox inoculation, which was also called variolation, or ingrafting. Lady Mary, who herself survived smallpox in 1716, learned of the practice in Constantinople, where her husband served as English ambassador from 1716 to 1718. While in Constantinople, she met Dr. Emanuel Timoni, who had published an account of inoculation in the Western scientific press in 1716. With Timoni's encouragement, Charles Maitland, the British surgeon brought by the Worthley family to Constantinople, successfully inoculated the Worthley's son. In a letter to Mrs. Sarah Chiswell, a London friend, Lady Mary described the ingrafting procedure, which consisted of taking dried secretions from smallpox blebs, or pustules, and either blowing them into the nostrils or injecting them into a vein or under the skin. This process produced a mild case of smallpox, which conferred lifelong immunity to natural smallpox. The process was hazardous—it occasionally caused serious disease or even death. Because smallpox was so lethal and disfiguring, however, it was considered an acceptable risk.

A severe epidemic of smallpox in London in 1721 led Lady Mary to begin a campaign in favor of inoculation that began with the inoculation of her young daughter. Shortly thereafter, royal permission was given to experimentally inoculate six condemned prisoners at Newgate Prison, all of whom survived and were pardoned. Lady Mary's strong connections with the royal family, and their adoption of inoculation among themselves, led to considerable public support for the practice, through strong opinions both for and against inoculation were widely published in the newspapers of the day.

Because it was occasionally fatal, many English physicians opposed the procedure. However, influential figures such as James Jurin (secretary of the Royal Society), John Arbuthnot, and Hans Sloane were supporters. Some historians believe that inoculation made a measurable impact on eighteenth-century mortality in England, particularly among the aristocracy, who were most likely to employ the practice. In the nineteenth century, inoculation was almost entirely supplanted by vaccination after William Jenner discovered in 1798 that immunity to smallpox could be established more safely by using material from the lesions of cows infected with cowpox or vaccinia.

NIGEL PANETH

ELLEN POLLAK

(SEE ALSO: Jenner, Edward; Smallpox)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grundy, I. (1994). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lawrence, A. W., ed. (1930). The Travel Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. London: Jonathan Cape.