The Inoculation War of 1718

Welcome back to another episode of The Chrono-Files, where we don’t just read history; we walk through it. I am your host, and today, we are stepping into a biological war zone. But there are no trenches, and the enemy is invisible. We are in London, late in the year 1718. The fog is thick, clinging to the cobblestones, but it is not the weather that has people terrified. It is the Speckled Monster. Smallpox.

Walk with me down this crowded street. Look at the faces of the passersby. You see them? The deep, pitted scars on the cheeks of that shopkeeper? The blindness in the left eye of that beggar? That is the mark of the beast. In this era, smallpox kills one in four of its victims. It spares no one. Queens, commoners, infants. Especially infants.

But there is a rumor swirling through the coffee houses and the royal drawing rooms. A rumor of a cure, or rather, a prevention, brought back from the mysterious East by one of the most brilliant and scandalous women of the age. We are about to meet her. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has just returned from the Ottoman Empire with a secret that could save millions, or, if you believe the medical establishment of London, a secret that is nothing more than dangerous, heathen magic.

We are standing now outside a fashionable townhouse. The air smells of coal smoke and wet wool. Inside, the clash between ancient tradition and radical science is about to ignite. I have managed to secure an audience with Lady Mary herself. She is expecting us. Let us go in.

The interior is lavish, filled with Turkish rugs and silks that whisper of her travels. Sitting by the window, catching the weak London light, is Lady Mary. She is striking, her eyes sharp with an intelligence that refuses to be dim, even though her own face bears the faint, telltale scars of the disease that nearly killed her three years ago. She lost her eyelashes, but she kept her fire.

Lady Mary, thank you for receiving me. The city is abuzz with your return, but even more so with the stories of what you did to your own son in Constantinople. They say you infected him with smallpox on purpose. Is this true?

Infected is such a crude word for a miracle, don’t you think? But yes. I did. And if the cowards in the Royal College of Physicians had their way, I would be branded a murderess rather than a mother. They call it madness. I call it ingrafting.

Take us back to that moment. It was March, earlier this year, was it not? You were in Pera, the diplomatic quarter of Constantinople.

March, yes. The heat had not yet set in. You must understand, in Turkey, this disease that terrorizes London—this monster that took my beautiful brother and ruined my own face—it is treated there with the casualness of a common cold. They take the smallpox by way of diversion, much as we take the waters at Bath.

I have read your letters to Sarah Chiswell. You described parties? Smallpox parties?

Precisely. It is quite the social season. Old women make it their business to perform the operation. I watched them in the autumn. A group of fifteen or sixteen people gather. An old Greek woman arrives with a nutshell—literally a walnut shell—filled with the matter of the best sort of smallpox. Not the virulent kind that kills, but a milder strain.

And the procedure? The doctors here in London imagine some dark, sorcerous ritual.

Oh, how they love to mystify what they cannot control. It is simple. The woman asks which vein you please to have opened. She rips it open with a large needle—it hurts no more than a scratch, I assure you—and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle. Then she binds it with a bit of hollow shell. She does this to four or five veins. The Greeks are superstitious; they like the sign of the cross on the arms and chest, but that is faith, not medicine. The effect is the same.

And the children? They simply walk away?

They play all day! Then, perhaps on the eighth day, the fever seizes them. They keep to their beds for two days, perhaps three. They rarely have more than twenty or thirty spots on their faces, which never mark. In eight days, they are as well as before. It is entirely harmless.

But to watch, Lady Mary... to watch a stranger cut into your son, Edward. He is only five years old. You ordered Mr. Maitland, the embassy surgeon, to assist?

Charles Maitland is a good man, but he is a Scot, and naturally cautious. He was terrified. He watched the old Greek woman do her work on my Edward with his heart in his throat. I told him I was patriot enough to bring this useful invention into fashion in England. But I knew... I knew the moment I returned, the war would begin.

And indeed it has. Since you arrived back in London a few months ago, the whispers have turned to shouts. Why is there such resistance? You are offering a way to stop the plague.

I’ve heard Dr. William Wagstaffe is preparing a pamphlet against you. He claims it is reckless to introduce a disease into a healthy body. He calls it an experiment of the most dangerous kind.

Dr. Wagstaffe is a fool with a diploma. He would rather see a thousand children die naturally than one child saved by a method he does not understand. They say I am unnatural. They say I am risking my soul. But I look at my son, Edward, running in the garden, his skin smooth, his life secure. And then I look at the children of London, waiting for the shadow to fall over them. Who is the unnatural one? The mother who protects her child, or the doctor who lets him die for the sake of tradition?

You seem ready for a fight, Lady Mary.

I am not just ready; I am impatient. I intend to write to the Princess of Wales. She has children. She has a mother's heart, unlike these cold men in their wigs. If I can convince the Princess, the rest of society will follow. It will be a battle, I know. They will preach against it from the pulpits. They will scream that I am interfering with Divine Providence. But I have seen the truth in a walnut shell.

It is a remarkable burden to carry. To know the cure, and be hated for it.

I am used to being observed, critiqued, and gossiped about. If my vanity must be the price for my country's health, so be it. I may be a woman of fashion, but I have seen enough death. I will not let them bury this discovery. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a letter to draft to the Princess Caroline. The campaign must continue.

Thank you, Lady Mary. We will leave you to your work.

We step back out into the London fog. The door closes behind us, shutting out the warmth of the drawing room. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is right. The war is just beginning. In the years to follow, she will face slander and abuse. It will take the inoculation of the Royal children, and the desperate experiment on six prisoners in Newgate Prison, to finally turn the tide.

But standing here in 1718, on the precipice of change, we can see the future. Because of that woman and her fierce resolve, the Speckled Monster will eventually be tamed. It will be another eighty years before Edward Jenner notices the milkmaids and refines this into vaccination, but the first blow against the disease was struck not by a doctor, but by a mother with a needle and a memory of Constantinople.