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.