Mary Wortley Montagu and the Treatment of Smallpox

The smallpox vaccination has been one of the greatest contributions science has made to better the human condition. Although Edward Jenner has justly earned credit for his development of the vaccine, an 18th-century British aristocratic woman named Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) also deserves recognition. Montagu was a “Turkophile,” and published many writings critiquing the confining culture, religion, and treatment of women in her native Britain. While traveling extensively in the Ottoman Empire (where she encountered Turkish culture), she gained admission to many spaces that only women were permitted to enter, and found the customs of the country – the clothing, the religion, the social mores – superior in many ways. One custom she discovered, embraced, and tried (with limited success) to promote in Britain was a Turkish treatment against smallpox. Practiced by the women Mary encountered, the idea was to take the pus from a patient with a mild case of the disease, and put it into a scratch of someone not infected. The result was the safety of the inoculated – or variolated, as it was then called – patient. Montagu herself had survived smallpox, but lost a brother to the devastating disease. She had her own son inoculated, and later, her daughter. She tried her best to promote the practice in Britain, but the cards were stacked against her: she was a woman, she had learned the practice from women, and xenophobia against the Ottoman Empire was rife. And, Montagu had no germ theory to offer as an explanation for why the practice would have worked. Inventions such as the microscope have since given us knowledge about the biology of disease, so that we can have material confirmation that supports the success of vaccinations today.