Chapter II: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

“As for History,” said the Duke of Marlborough, “I know that it is false;” and whoever has occasion to enter minutely into any historical question will be apt to concur with the Duke. Happening to refer to Walter Bagehot’s essay on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, I found this passage--

She brought from Turkey the notion of inoculation. Like most
improvers, she was roughly spoken to. Medical men were angry
because the practice was not in their books, and conservative
men were cross at the agony of a new idea. Religious people
considered it wicked to have a disease which Providence did not
think fit to send you; and simple people “did not like to make
themselves ill of their own accord.” She triumphed, however, over
all obstacles; inoculation, being really found to lengthen life
and save complexions, before long became general.[11]

Now Bagehot loved accuracy and abhorred credulity; and yet in these lines, delivered with as much confidence as a column of the multiplication table, there are exhibited about as much inaccuracy and credulity as could be packed into the space. Let us see what Lady Mary really did in the matter of inoculation.

Mr. Wortley Montagu was appointed ambassador to the Porte, and set out for Constantinople in the autumn of 1716 accompanied by his wife, then in her twenty-seventh year. The Ottoman Empire was in those days powerful and proud, disdaining to send representatives to Christian Courts, and receiving ambassadors as commercial agents, or as bearers of homage from their respective sovereigns. The English ambassador reached his destination early in 1717, and ere a month had passed, and ere Lady Mary had time to look around and appreciate the strange world into which she had entered, with sprightly audacity she wrote as follows to her friend Miss Sarah Chiswell--

I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish
yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal, and so general amongst us,
is here entirely harmless by the invention of _ingrafting_, 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
smallpox: 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 smallpox,
and asks what veins 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 venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after
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,
in each arm, and 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
choose 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 [pustules] in their faces, which never mark; and in eight
days’ time they are as well as before their illness. Where they
are wounded, there remain 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 smallpox 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 very well
satisfied of the safety of the experiment, since I intend to try
it on my dear little son.

I am patriot enough to take 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.

In this letter there was material for a smallpox idyl--nothing easier, nothing surer, “smallpox made entirely harmless.” But idyls are deceptive; their paradisiacal effects are obtained by the sedulous exclusion of whatever is otherwise. About the time that Lady Mary was romancing so triumphantly to Miss Sarah Chiswell she despatched this note to her husband--

Sunday, 23rd March, 1717-18.

The boy[12] was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time
singing and playing, and very impatient for his supper. I pray
God my next may give as good an account of him.... I cannot
engraft the girl; her nurse has not had the smallpox.

Why should the engrafting of the infant have been hindered because the nurse had not had smallpox? The answer to the question reveals a peril concealed from Miss Sarah Chiswell. Because the engrafted child would probably have communicated unmitigated smallpox to the nurse. Why not then engraft nurse and child? Because they would have sickened together, and mother Mary did not care to incur the risk. There was no danger, she said; none whatever, only a pleasant diversion; nevertheless she preferred discretion to her own voluble assurance.

In History we have always to suspect the picturesque, for mankind have a fatal preference for handsome error over uncomely fact; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as mother of English inoculation, and derivatively of vaccination, is ever so much more graceful than dull Timoni and Pylarini in the _Philosophical Transactions_, or Cotton Mather in New England. Few condescend to inquire whether Lady Mary, as primary inoculator, was acting independently, or whether she had advisers and prompters. “All of her self and by her self” is the heroic representation--“a woman’s wit against the world;” and judgment surrenders to fancy, as is the way with myths ancient and modern.

But it so happens that what in itself ought to be incredible--that a young Englishwoman should suddenly adopt the strange practice of a strange people--is demonstrably incredible. Lady Mary did not act alone. She had for counsellor and director, Charles Maitland, the physician to the embassy, who, familiar with the fame of inoculation, was glad to observe its practice experimentally. Maitland writes--

In the year 1717, when I had the honour to attend the English
Ambassador and his family at Constantinople, I had a fair
opportunity fully to inform myself _of what I had long before
heard_, namely, the famous practice of transplanting, or raising
the smallpox by inoculation.[13]

Here we may note, too, that Maitland was aware that inoculation did not originate in Turkey. He says--

Whilst universally practised all over Turkey for three-score
years past, it has been known in other parts of the East, a
hundred, or, for aught we know, some hundreds of years before.[14]

It was Maitland who managed the inoculation of young Montagu, and he thus described the operation--

About this time, the Ambassador’s ingenious lady resolved to
submit her only son to it, a very hopeful boy of about six years
of age. She first of all ordered me to find out a fit subject
to take the matter from, and then sent for an old Greek woman
who had practised this way a great many years. After a good deal
of trouble and pains, I found a proper subject, and then the
good woman went to work; but so awkwardly by the shaking of her
hand, and put the child to so much torture with her blunt and
rusty needle, that I pitied his cries, who had ever been of such
spirit and courage that hardly anything of pain could make him
cry before; and, therefore, inoculated the other arm with my own
instrument, and with so little pain to him that he did not in
the least complain of it. The operation took in both arms, and
succeeded perfectly well.... He had about an hundred pox all upon
his body. This operation was performed at Pera in the month of
March, 1717.

That is to say, almost simultaneously with the Ambassador’s arrival in Turkey.

The embassy returned to England in 1718, after a residence of little over a year in Constantinople. The dates are worth observation; for whilst it appears that the doctor and the lady were in common resolved to recommend the practice of inoculation to their countrymen, the dates prove with what inexperience and levity they assumed the grave responsibility. If quackery be assertion in absence of knowledge or of evidence, then we may accurately stigmatise Maitland and Montagu a couple of quacks. But so far as concerns Maitland we may go farther, for he expressly tells us--

I was assured and saw with my eyes that the smallpox is rather
more malignant and epidemic in the Turkish dominions than with
us; insomuch that, as some have affirmed, one-half, or at least
one-third part of the diseased, at certain times, do die of it;
and they that escape are terribly disfigured by it.[15]

Yet this same Maitland, who thus testified of the impotence of inoculation to mitigate and restrain smallpox in Turkey, came to England ready to assert its power to mitigate and restrain! It is difficult to find words of due severity for such impudent inconsistency. We shall see, however, in the course of this wonderful story, how every rule of evidence may be defied in the matter of smallpox, and how it is possible to shut one’s eyes and prophesy in the name of science, and have noise and hardihood accepted for veracity.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] _Literary Studies_, Vol. i. p. 248.

[12] Born in Yorkshire, 1713.

[13] _Account of Inoculating for Smallpox._ London, 1722.

[14] _A Short Account of Inoculation._ London, 1723.

[15] _Account of Inoculating for Smallpox_, p. 4.