Mary Wortley Montagu The scourge of smallpox

That humanity won its battle with smallpox is in no small part down to the resilience of a woman who pioneered inoculation in 18th-century Britain, in the teeth of tremendous resistance. JO WILLETT reveals how Mary Wortley Montagu changed the course of medical history

- JO WILLETT

In April 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was shut up in Twickenham with her two children for company. A smallpox pandemic was raging. She sent out servants daily to glean the names of those dead from the disease. Mary had narrowly escaped death herself when she had contracted smallpox five years before, and she had also lost her beloved only brother, William, to it.

Yet Lady Mary knew of a means of protection against a disease that, across the centuries, has killed hundreds of millions and disfigured many more. After she recovered from smallpox, her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was made ambassador to the Ottoman empire. And it was during her family’s 15-month residency in Constantinople that Lady Mary was introduced to a treatment that, with her help, would alter the course of medical history. It was called inoculation.

While her husband was away on ambassadorial business, Mary ensured that their only son was inoculated by a little old Greek woman with no medical training. “She puts into the vein as much venom as can lye upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell,” Mary wrote of the procedure.

Inoculating her son in Turkey was a very different thing from protecting her only daughter – who was also called Mary – back in England. No one in a western country had ever been inoculated. But when, two years after the family returned home, a severe epidemic swept Britain, she knew she had to take action.