Lady Mary Wortley Montagu — Storied No. 081

In the spring of 1717, in the Ottoman city of Adrianople, the English ambassador's wife watched old women do something no London physician would have dared. They opened a small vein, pressed in a needle's worth of matter from a mild smallpox sore, bound the scratch with a nutshell, and sent the children off to play. A few days of fever, a scattering of spots — and those children never caught smallpox again.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu knew exactly what she was seeing. Smallpox had killed her brother and, two years earlier, had nearly killed her, taking her eyelashes and pitting her celebrated face. She had her own son engrafted in Constantinople, and back in London she had her daughter done in the middle of an epidemic, under the eyes of the King's physicians. Doctors scoffed, preachers thundered, and history would hand the smallpox story to Edward Jenner. But the road to the first vaccine began with a woman who refused to look away.

From Covent Garden to the Bosphorus

The lifeline

1689

Born Mary Pierrepont in London; teaches herself Latin in her father's library

1713

Her only brother, William, dies of smallpox

1715

Survives smallpox herself — scarred, and without eyelashes

1717

At Adrianople, writes home describing Ottoman "engrafting"

1721

Has her daughter inoculated in London — the first recorded in Britain

1762

Dies in London, months after returning from 22 years in Italy and France

By the numbers

The odds she changed

1 in 7

Roughly how many caught in natural smallpox died, in James Jurin's 1720s tallies

1 in 50

Roughly how many died after inoculation, by the same count

6

Condemned Newgate prisoners inoculated in 1721 — every one survived and was freed

75

Years between her daughter's inoculation and Jenner's first cowpox vaccination, 1796

What she saw, did and dared

The campaign

1 Apr 1717

The letter from Adrianople. To her friend Sarah Chiswell she describes engrafting parties "commonly fifteen or sixteen together" each September, and vows to bring the practice "into fashion in England."

Mar 1718

Her son, aged nearly five, is engrafted in Constantinople by an old Greek woman, watched by the embassy surgeon Charles Maitland.

Apr 1721

Her daughter, aged three, is inoculated by Maitland in London during a severe epidemic, with court physicians called in as witnesses.

Aug 1721

The "Royal Experiment." With royal licence, six prisoners at Newgate are inoculated in exchange for pardons. All six live.

Apr 1722

The royal children. Caroline, Princess of Wales — Lady Mary's friend and ally — has two of her daughters inoculated, and fashion follows.

Sep 1722

"A Plain Account of the Inoculating of the Small Pox, by a Turkey Merchant." Her rebuttal of the doctors runs in the Flying Post — anonymously, and in a man's voice.

1763

The Turkish Embassy Letters are published the year after her death, and become a classic of travel writing.

Mocked, then remembered

Recognition

In her lifetime

Physicians derided engrafting as a folk remedy of uneducated women from a Muslim land
Preached against: Edmund Massey's 1722 sermon called inoculation "dangerous and sinful"
Her defence of it could only be printed unsigned, posing as a male merchant
Medical credit went to the men who performed and wrote up the operations

Today

A 1789 monument in Lichfield Cathedral honours her for bringing inoculation from Turkey to England
Jenner himself was inoculated as a boy — the practice she championed was the ground his vaccine grew from
Her Letters are read as a landmark of women's travel writing and of East–West encounter
Historians of medicine place her at the start of the road to smallpox eradication, declared in 1980

The place that showed her

Adrianople (Edirne)

The old Ottoman capital in Thrace, where Sultan Ahmed III kept his court when the embassy arrived. Lady Mary went about in Turkish dress, visited the women's baths and households closed to male travellers — and there learned what Western doctors had never asked about.

September

The engrafting season, she wrote, "when the great heat is abated"

15–16

Children gathered at each engrafting party, as she counted them

1453

The year it ceded the title of Ottoman capital to Constantinople

"I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England." — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter from Adrianople, 1717