A last word as to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. After a residence of twenty years in Italy, she returned to England to die, 21st August, 1762. On the west side of the north door in Lichfield Cathedral, there is a female figure, in marble, leaning on an urn inscribed M. W. M. The inscription runs—
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU,
WHO HAPPILY INTRODUCED, FROM TURKEY,
INTO THIS COUNTRY,
THE SALUTARY ART OF INOCULATING THE SMALLPOX.
CONVINCED OF ITS EFFICACY,
SHE FIRST TRIED IT WITH SUCCESS
ON HER OWN CHILDREN,
AND THEN RECOMMENDED THE PRACTICE OF IT TO
HER FELLOW-CITIZENS.
THUS, BY HER EXAMPLE AND ADVICE,
WE HAVE SOFTENED THE VIRULENCE, AND
ESCAPED THE DANGER, OF THIS MALIGNANT DISEASE.
TO PERPETUATE THE MEMORY OF SUCH BENEVOLENCE,
AND TO EXPRESS HER GRATITUDE
FOR THE BENEFIT SHE HERSELF RECEIVED FROM
THIS ALLEVIATING ART,
THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY
HENRIETTA INGE,
RELICT OF THEODORE WILLIAM INGE, ESQ.,
AND DAUGHTER OF SIR JOHN WROTTESLEY, BART.,
IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD,
MDCCLXXXIX.
Whilst we do not resort to epitaphs for truth, we may discover in them what was taken for truth, or what was wished to be taken for truth. We have in the foregoing epitaph the legend which has caught the popular fancy, and which is likely to survive corrections innumerable. It is the custom of mankind to identify a common movement with some prominent or picturesque figure in the movement, and to suppress the rest. The practice is convenient, but it taints all history with fable.
It may be said that the practice of inoculation met with no active resistance in England during the last thirty years of last century. How widely and deeply it extended it would be difficult to determine. The probability is, that the mass of the population was untouched, and that inoculation was limited to the upper and middle classes, and to the lower so far as they came under the immediate influence of those above them. We have, perhaps, an index to the condition of affairs in Dr. Wm. Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, first published in 1769, which ran through eighteen editions, amounting to 80,000 copies, in the author’s life-time. It is not uncommon to refer contemptuously to Buchan, but his work was the production of a man of vigorous good sense with faith in the good sense of his readers—a book creditable to the author and to the people who appreciated him.
Buchan was an inoculator, a zealous advocate of inoculation, and earnestly laboured to universalise the practice. In the Domestic Medicine, ed. 1797, he wrote—
No discovery can be of general utility while the practice of it is kept in the hands of a few. Had Inoculation been practised by the same kind of operators in our country as in the countries from which we derived it, it had long ago been universal. The fears, the jealousies, the prejudices, and the opposite interests of the Faculty are, and ever will be, the most effectual obstacles to the progress of any salutary discovery. Hence it is that Inoculation never became in any manner general in England till taken up by men not bred to physic.
Consistently with this opinion, Buchan strongly advocated domestic practice, saying—
They know very little of the matter, who impute the success of modern inoculators to any superior skill, either in preparing the patient or communicating the disease. Some of them, indeed, from a sordid desire of engrossing the whole practice to themselves, pretend to have extraordinary secrets or nostrums for preparing persons for inoculation, which never fail of success. But this is only a pretence calculated to blind the ignorant and inattentive. Common-sense and prudence alone are sufficient both in the choice of the subject and management of the operation. Whoever is possessed of these may perform this office for his children whenever he finds it convenient, provided they be in a good state of health.
This statement is not the result of theory, but of observation. Though few physicians have had more opportunities of trying inoculation in all its different forms, so little appears to me to depend on those generally reckoned important circumstances, of preparing the body, communicating the infection by this or the other method, etc., that, for several years past, I have persuaded parents and nurses to perform the entire operation themselves.