The most fortunate thing that happened to Lady Mary, and through her to England, during her stay in Adrianople, was being made acquainted with the practice of inoculation, then widely in vogue in Turkey. Though she had no medical knowledge, she made enquiries as to its effect, and soon became convinced that it was very highly beneficial. She was the more interested because an attack of small-pox had somewhat dimmed her beauty. It was to Miss Sarah Chiswell that she unburdened herself of the discovery she had made.
"Those dreadful stories you have heard of the plague have very little foundation in truth. I own I have much ado to reconcile myself to the sound of a word which has always given me such terrible ideas, though I am convinced there is little more in it than a fever. As a proof of which we passed through two or three towns most violently infected. In the very next house where we lay (in one of those places) two persons died of it. Luckily for me, I was so well deceived that I knew nothing of the matter; and I was made believe, that our second cook who fell ill here had only a great cold. However, we left our doctor to take care of him, and yesterday they both arrived here in good health; and I am now let into the secret that he has had the plague. There are many that escape it; neither is the air ever infected. I am persuaded it would be as easy to root it out here as out of Italy and France; but it does so little mischief, they are not very solicitous about it, and are content to suffer this distemper instead of our variety, which they are utterly unacquainted with.
"A propos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, 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 small-pox; 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 small-pox, 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 midde 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 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 embassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox 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 this 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, &c."
The immediate history of inoculation, so far as Lady Mary is concerned, may here briefly be given. She first heard of the practice in March, 1717, and within a year her faith in its effect was so strong that in the spring of the following year she had her son inoculated at Pera—he was the first English person to undergo the operation. "The boy was engrafted last Tuesday," she wrote to her husband the following Sunday, "and is at this time singing and playing, and very impatient for his supper…. I cannot engraft the girl; her nurse has not had the small-pox." It is amusing to learn that the inoculation of the young Edward Wortley Montagu proved presently to have an advantage which was certainly not at the time of the operation present to the mind of the mother. At the age of six or thereabouts, the child ran away from Westminster school—he was always running away from school—and a reward of £20 and expenses was offered to whoever found him. The advertisement gave the following clue: there are "two marks by which he is easily known, viz., on the back of each arm, about two or three inches above the wrist, a small roundish scar, less than a silver penny, like a large mark of the small-pox."
When Lady Mary returned to London, she carried out her intention to introduce the operation. Dr. Maitland, who had been physician to the mission to the Porte, set up in practice and inoculated under her patronage. The "heathen rite" was vigorously preached against by the clergy and was violently abused by the medical faculty. Undismayed by the powerful opposition, however, she persevered in season and out, until her efforts were crowned with success. She was fortunate in enlisting the co-operation of that distinguished doctor, Richard Mead, celebrated by Pope in his "Epistle to Bolingbroke,"
"I'll do what Mead and Cheselden advise."
Mead, in 1720, when an epidemic of the plague was feared in London, published a treatise: "A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion and the Methods to be used to Prevent it." It was reprinted seven times within a year, and an eighth edition appeased in 1722. Lady Mary obtained permission, in 1721, to experiment on seven condemned criminals. Mead supervised the inoculations, and all recovered. In the following year two members of the royal family underwent the operation successfully. Thereafter, it became, in most circles, fashionable.
"I suppose," Lady Mary wrote with pardonable pride to Lady Mar in the spring of 1722, "that the same faithful historians give you regular accounts of the growth and spreading of the inoculation of the small-pox, which is become almost a general practice, attended with great success." Elated as she was at the success that had resulted from her persistent efforts, she was correspondingly distressed when a young relative died of the disease. "I am sorry to inform you of the death, of our nephew, my sister Gower's son, of the small-pox," she said in a letter to Lady Mar in July, 1723. "I think she has a great deal of regret it, in consideration of the offer I made her, two years together, of taking the child home to my house, where I would have inoculated him with the same care and safety I did my own. I know nobody that has hitherto repented the operation; though it has been very troublesome to some fools, who had rather be sick by the doctor's prescriptions, than in health in rebellion to the college."
Among those who supported Lady Mary's campaign was Steele, who
congratulated her upon her "godlike delight" of saving "many thousand
British lives every year." He wrote on the subject in the Plain Dealer
(July 3, 1724), in an article that attracted much attention: