From ‘unnatural mother’ to ‘Mother of Inoculation’: Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

Описание: From ‘unnatural mother’ to ‘Mother of Inoculation’: Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

In the early 18th century, Britain was plagued by a number of smallpox epidemics. Smallpox was a highly infectious disease that killed 1 in 4. Mary’s brother and several other relatives and friends died of smallpox. A celebrated beauty in London’s society, Mary survived an infection, but was left with disfiguring pock marks, a life-long sensitivity to light and the blunt, uncompromising ‘Wortley stare’, a result of losing all her eyelashes. One of her most valuable social assets had been destroyed.

In a poem, she puts her own grief about the loss of her beauty into the mouth of her heroine, Flavia: ‘Ah Faithless Glass, my wonted bloom restore / Alas, I rave! That bloom is now no more.’

Yet, Mary’s personal loss is contrasted by her achievement of introducing a life-saving medical procedure to Europe. It eventually led to Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796, and to vaccination as a technique that has since helped fight many diseases, including COVID-19.

Mary learned the technique of inoculation or ‘engrafting’ in Turkey, where her husband was stationed as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She had both her children engrafted and, back home in London, endeavoured to convince others of the procedure. But her efforts for inoculation were an uphill struggle against convention, public opinion and the male medical establishment.

Nowadays considered a pioneering public health campaigner, people jeered at her carriage as she drove past, and she was defamed as an unnatural mother, who had risked the lives of her own children: ‘what an arduous, what a fearful and, we may add, what a thankless enterprise it was’, she complained.

Only towards the end of her life, Mary’s achievement was beginning to be recognised. Today, 300 years after introducing the life-saving practice of smallpox inoculation to Britain, she is finally on her way to claim her long-overdue place in Western medical history.

#MedicalPioneer #WomenInScience #immunology #smallpox #virology #inoculation
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