Inoculation, or, as it was at first called, engrafting for the small-pox, was reported from the East to British physicians as early as |1726.| 1714, but neglected. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, visiting Turkey with her husband, the British ambassador, found it in full vogue there, and reported it at once so safe and so effectual, that people came together as to a party of pleasure to have it performed upon them by old women. It was in March 1718 that her ladyship, viewing the matter in entire independence of all silly fears, submitted her infant son to the process. Finding it successful, she exerted herself, on her return to England, to have the practice introduced there, and, by favour of Caroline, Princess of Wales, gained her point against the usual host of objectors. Her own daughter was the first person inoculated in Great Britain. It was then tried on four criminals, reprieved for the purpose, and found successful. Two of the princess’s children followed, in April 1722. The process was simultaneously introduced into Boston, in Massachusetts.
Lady Mary tells us next year, that inoculation was beginning to be a good deal practised. ‘I am,’ says she, ‘so much pulled about and solicited to visit people, that I am forced to run into the country to hide myself.’[[656]] Yet the fact is, that it made its way very slowly, having to encounter both the prejudices of medical men, who misapprehended its scientific nature, and the objections of certain serious people, who denounced it as ‘taking the Almighty’s work out of his hands.’[[657]] Just as the two young princesses were recovering, appeared a pamphlet, in which the author argued that this new invention is ‘utterly unlawful, an audacious presumption, and a thing forbid in Scripture, in that express command: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”’ It would appear as if there never yet was any valuable discovery made for the alleviation of misery, or the conferring of positive benefits on mankind, but there are some persons who find it irreligious, and would be rejoiced in seeing it fail. It must have been under such a spirit that some one inserted in the prints of the day a notice desiring ‘all persons who know anything of the ill success of inoculation, to send a particular account thereof to Mr Roberts, printer in Warwickshire.’ Only 897 persons (of whom seventeen died) were inoculated during the first eight years.[[658]]
The operation appears not to have been introduced in Scotland till upwards of five years after its introduction in London. A letter of the date noted, from Mr R. Boyd in Edinburgh to the |1726.| Rev. Mr Wodrow at Eastwood, gives the following among other matters of familiar intelligence: ‘The story of Abercromby of Glassaugh’s child being inoculated in this country, and recovered of the small-pox, is in the written letter and some of the prints.’[[659]] From the reference to a written letter—namely, a periodical holograph sheet of news from London—we may infer that the infant in question was inoculated there, and that the practice was as yet unknown in our country.
Oct. 19.
An interesting and singular scene was this day presented in the streets of Edinburgh. Five men, named Garnock, Foreman, Stewart, Ferrie, and Russell, were executed at the Gallowlee on the 10th of October 1681, and their heads put up at the Cowgate Port, while their bodies were interred under the gallows. Some of their friends lifted and re-interred the bodies in the West Churchyard, and also took down the heads for a similar purpose; but, being scared, were obliged to inhume these relics, enclosed in a box, in a garden at Lauriston, on the south side of the city. On the 7th October of this year, the heads were discovered as they had been laid there forty-five years before, the box only being consumed. Mr Shaw, the owner of the garden, had them lifted and laid out in a summer-house, where the friends of the old cause had access to see them. Patrick Walker relates what followed. ‘I rejoiced,’ he says, ‘to see so many concerned grave men and women favouring the dust of our martyrs. There were six of us concluded to bury them upon the nineteenth day of October 1726, and every one of us to acquaint friends of the day and hour, being Wednesday, the day of the week upon which most of them were executed, and at 4 of the clock at night, being the hour that most of them went to their resting graves. We caused make a compleat coffin for them in black, with four yards of fine linen, the way that our martyrs’ corps were managed; and, having the happiness of friendly magistrates at the time, we went to the present Provost Drummond, and Baillie Nimmo, and acquainted them with our conclusions anent them; with which they were pleased, and said, if we were sure that they were our martyrs’ heads, we might bury them decently and orderly.... Accordingly, we kept the foresaid day and hour, and doubled the linen, and laid the half of it below them, their nether jaws being parted from their heads; but being young men, their teeth |1726.| remained. All were witness to the holes in each of their heads, which the hangman broke with his hammer; and, according to the bigness of their skulls, we laid their jaws to them, and drew the other half of the linen above them, and stufft the coffin with shavings. Some pressed hard to go thorow the chief parts of the city, as was done at the Revolution; but this we refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious observing of such an affecting, surprising, unheard-of dispensation: but took the ordinary way of other burials from that place—to wit, we went east the back of the wall, and in at Bristo Port, and down the way to the head of the Cowgate, and turned up to the churchyard, where they were interred closs to the Martyrs’ Tomb, with the greatest multitude of people, old and young, men and women, ministers and others, that ever I saw together.’
A citizen of Edinburgh heard from a lady born in 1736 an account, at second-hand, of this remarkable solemnity—with one fact additional to what is stated by Walker. ‘In the procession was a number of genteel females, all arrayed in white satin, as emblematical of innocence.’
A proceeding in which the same spirit was evinced is noted in the Edinburgh Courant of November 4, 1728. ‘We hear that the separatists about Dumfries, who retain the title of Cameronians, have despatched three of their number to Magus Muir, in Fife, to find out the burial-place of Thomas Brown, Andrew ..., James Wood, John Clyde, and John Weddell, who were there execute during the Caroline persecution for being in arms at Bothwell Bridge, and have marked the ground, in order to erect a monument with an inscription like that of the Martyrs’ Tomb in Greyfriars’ Churchyard, to perpetuate the zeal and sufferings of these men.’
A few months later, we learn from the same sententious chronicler: ‘The Martyrs’ Tomb in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard is repaired, and there is added to it a compartment, on which is cut a head and a hand on pikes, as emblems of their sufferings, betwixt which is to be engraved a motto alluding to both.’
1727. Mar. 30.
Died Sir Alexander Ogilvy of Forglen, Baronet, a judge of the Court of Session under the designation of Lord Forglen. There is no particular reason for chronicling the demise of a respectable but noteless senator of the College of Justice, beyond the eccentric and characteristic circumstances attending it. According to a note in the unpublished diary of James Boswell, the biographer |1727.| of Dr Johnson—when Lord Forglen was approaching the end of his life, he received a visit from his friend Mr James Boswell, advocate, the grandfather of the narrator of the anecdote. The old judge was quite cheerful, and said to his visitor: ‘Come awa, Mr Boswell, and learn to dee: I’m gaun awa to see your auld freend Cullen and mine. [This was Lord Cullen, another judge, who had died exactly a year before.] He was a guid honest man; but his walk and yours was nae very steady when you used to come in frae Maggy Johnston’s upon the Saturday afternoons.’ That the reader may understand the force of this address, it is necessary to explain that Mrs Johnston kept a little inn near Bruntsfield Links, which she contrived to make attractive to men of every grade in life by her home-brewed ale. It here appears that among her customers were Mr Boswell, a well-employed advocate, and Lord Cullen, a judge—one, it may be observed, of good reputation, a writer on moral themes, and with whose religious practice even Mr Wodrow was not dissatisfied.