Dan Snow's History Hit - Lady Mary and the First Inoculation

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

In the 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an aristocrat, courtier, brilliant beauty, intellectual, wife to the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and a sufferer from smallpox. It was during her time in Constantinople that she witnessed a procedure that would alter the course of her life; inoculation. Having inoculated her children she brought the practice back to Britain where she inoculated the offspring of the high and mighty including the daughters of the royal family. Jo Willet, TV producer and author of The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu, joins Dan to explore the fascinating life of the 18th Century ‘It Girl’ turned public health pioneer.Over the weekend there was a mix up with two of our episodes. If you want to go back and listen to the brilliant Diarmaid Ferriter discussing Irish independence then please click here.

Hello everybody, welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. You join me on a foggy day. I look out across the English channel now from my study window. The book line study. It's where it all happens, folks. Anyway, I'm looking out and there's fog in the channel. Terribly sad. Terribly sad for the continent of Europe to be cut off from Britain in these conditions. The foghorn you may be able to hear. The foghorns are still honking, I guess, in the distance. A wonderfully irrelevant piece of technology now that every ship has got a GPS tracker on it. But anyway, love hearing it. This episode is also about technology.

Good segue there. This episode features Jo Willett. She's a brilliant, award-winning TV producer, storyteller, and she spotted one hell of a story here. Talking about Lady Wortley Montagu, an aristocratic, brilliant courtier, beauty, sufferer from smallpox, intellectual, an ambassador's wife. She was the ambassador's wife into the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople. She saw a procedure there, inoculation, that she then brought back to

Britain. She was a pioneer of public health. She inoculated the daughters of the royal family. Absolutely extraordinary story about an 80th century it girl turned public health pioneer. If you wish to probably, which you do, go and get more history. If your passion for history is such that it cannot be satisfied by this one podcast, then not because if you go to historyhit.tv simple little type in a website simple as that historyhit.tv you go on there you get the world's best history channel the netflix of history documentaries audio a safe space for history fans so please head over there and do that what's our 18th century history on there, which I hope you'll enjoy. And last thing,

sorry for those of you who were listening and these podcasts weren't just autoplaying in your sleep. Those of you actually listening and told me that we switched around two of our podcast broadcasts this weekend, the geography one and the Irish one.

Apologies if that's all been sorted out now. So if you want to go and listen to the Irish episode, which is particularly good, Professor Ferreter on the Republic of Ireland, it was such a good episode. Just go and re-download that episode now and it will be totally ready to go.

So thank you very much for putting up with us. Thank you for subscribing to History.tv. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Joe, thank you very much for coming on the podcast oh it's a pleasure huge pleasure well it's a pleasure for me this is a heck of a story let's talk about mary wortley montague there's so many wortley montague's knocking on british history they must all presumably be related but their names get more and more confusing as they intermarry but she was a 80th century aristocrat. Absolutely, yes. That was her married name. She was born Mary Pierpont and her father was Duke of Kingston

and then she married Edward Wortley Montague. In fact, she eloped with him. That's her married name. Yes. She had one of these extraordinary kind of 18th century lives mixing with some of the most remarkable people, didn't she?

Oh, certainly. She was known as one of the most intelligent women of her time. And when she came to London as a young married woman, she kind of fell in with a group of all the best writers and artists of the day. So she knew Pope very well. He was her best friend for many years. She knew John Gay. She knew William Congreve.

But she also, she had a short career at court, so she knew royalty. And she was very interested in politics. He was a politician, Edward Wortley Montague. So she knew Walpole very well. Actually, Wortley wasn't at all keen on Walpole, but she really liked him. And in fact, she did introduce Walpole to his mistress, who you mentioned the other day in your podcast, Mariah Skerritt. Brilliant. Well, I tell you, it's a small world back in the early 18th century, wasn't it? Yes. So she became this sort of fabulous star of early Georgian London. When did she get smallpox?

So she got smallpox at that time, at the end of 1715, she contracted smallpox. Of course, people didn't really know how they contracted it. She was in a rented house and she had written ahead to Wortley saying, can you make sure that people beforehand that they got rid of the sheets because she had read that they had had smallpox. But she'd been living there for a time, so goodness knows how she got it, but she got it. He was away. He was very often away because he had a family mining business up in Newcastle and Durham, that area of England. So she was by herself. She sent her little boy away and she went through smallpox. They thought that she would die. There was straw laid on the ground outside to soften the horse's hooves.

But she came through it. But although she came through it, she, of course, was pot marked very badly, like people were. So that was the end of her career at court. That's interesting, Jo. You say the end of her career at court. Really, what ugly people were sort of banished, were they? Well, she had this great line, monarchs and beauties rule with equal sway. You kind of had to look decorative if you're a woman, and she didn't look so decorative.

She wasn't the best of courtiers, because she was always quite outspoken. And she had written, which only we know now, it wasn't published, but she'd written a piece about an account of life at the court of George I, where she described George I as an honest blockhead. So she always said as she thought it was for things like this. Yeah. And tell me a little bit more about smallpox. It's one of those extraordinary phenomena that was ubiquitous, was part of all of our lives, and now is just absolutely gone. How normal was it for someone to get smallpox in this period? And what effect did it have on you? Yes, well, it was

becoming more severe. In her grandparents' time, it was a bit like measles, something that you wanted your children to get, or German measles, I suppose we'd say now. But as time went on, in Britain and in western europe it was becoming increasingly severe and although mary survived it her only and dearly loved younger brother had died of it age 19 so she knew what it was like to have people die yeah if you got it were you quite happy that you survived or were you like really annoyed about being disfigured with the scarring? I think you were so relieved to have survived. Okay.

Surely, yeah. But it wasn't just that she was scarred. She also could never again look at bright light. Her eyesight was affected and that was a very common thing. And she also lost her eyelashes. So her friends always referred to her having the workly stare after that. So you were glad to survive. I mean, people often had mental health problems forever afterwards if they had smallpox. I mean, it was really very, very serious. And of course, it affected children,

which is something that's different for us with COVID now, that we're more aware that it's older people. But with smallpox, it was a disease of the young and that was a big concern. Also seems like anecdotally people talk about you're all in this together and the sort of mythology around that Covid ignores class and racial well of course we know that's not true because if you're impoverished you work in certain ways you're more likely to get it. When you read histories of the early modern period smallpoxpox wiped out kings and dukes, didn't it? I'm sure there was an element of it that of course depended on your socioeconomic status, but it did affect those who ruled as well as those who had no say, the downtrodden. Well, absolutely. I mean, for instance, when we

think of William and Mary, Mary died of smallpox. So a Queen of England has died of smallpox. So we re-engage with the fabulous Mary after she has been, I'm a bit sad about this, but she's been sent away from court. She looks completely different. What does she go on and do? What does she go on and do? Well, very soon after that, Wortley was appointed as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, to Turkey. So she went out with him to Turkey. Normally in those days, the man, it was always the man, would go alone.

But being Lady Mary, she resolved to go with him. So together they travelled out overland with a little boy to Turkey. And when she was there, she experienced firsthand the fact that in Turkey, smallpox was not so serious. And the reason it wasn't was because they were doing something called inoculation or engraftment. Inoculation literally from a kind of in-eyeing, it meant, so almost like a kind of horticultural term, where what they would do is make cuts, very shallow cuts on wrists and ankles and introduce a tiny amount of smallpox pus taken from someone who had smallpox

into a volunteer. People would have smallpox parties, they were called, where a group of people would go away and this would be done to all of them. And 10 days afterwards, they would suffer a very mild form of smallpox. So where you would normally get thousands of spots, they would maybe get about 10 or 20 spots. And then a few days later, they would be fine again. So she saw this firsthand. How had the Ottoman Empire been on this journey? Where had this come from? It had come from China, from further east than that, it seems. That's when that first started to happen. And it was quite a common thing. Well, it was a very common thing in Turkey

that they did it. So, but we don't know exactly when inoculation started. It's difficult to trace it. So it's travelling west across Eurasia. And how important is Lady Mary in facilitating the next jump west? While she was there, she had her only son inoculated while Wortley was away, because she knew he wouldn't be very keen on the idea. But doing that was not itself historic, because the previous ambassador, Sir Robert Sutton, had had his two sons inoculated. So although that was a brave thing to do, it wasn't the life-changing thing, which was the decision in Twickenham, when she came back to England in April 1721, so 300 years ago, to inoculate her only daughter. And when she was still in Turkey, she wrote back to her childhood

friend, Sarah Chiswell, saying, this will be very controversial. And she said, if I live to return, I may, however, have the courage to war with the doctors, because she knew that the doctors would not be pro doing what she was going to do. Wow. Would there have been a sort of superiority in the early 18th century that you would have certainly found 100 years later with the idea that some sort of Turkish practice is not good enough for Britain? Or was there still this fascination with the East, the understanding that lots of important innovations and ideas had come out of the East? Oh, no, I think it was definitely before. When then inoculation started happening,

there was a lot of anti-Turkish feeling then about how dare these Turks tell us what to do, because there was a whole pamphlet war that ensued and that Turkish thing came through. But also it was the fact that it was a folk practice. It was just done by illiterate women in Turkey. Actually, the Turks tended to use Greek or Armenian women, presumably because they felt they could dispense with them if it went wrong. You know, if they got smallpox and died, it wasn't the end of the world.

It was Greek and Armenian women who were used by Turks to inoculate these parties of Turks. You're listening to Antisocial History. I'm talking to Joe Willett about Lady Mary Wortley Montague. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers

and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict we've got the classics understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in potsdam was really starlin saying yeah tell me something i don't know the unexpected and it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities.

Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. So she goes from wanting to protect her own family to sort of launching a kind of national campaign doesn't she how does that work out yes i mean we can't absolutely prove that she was the person who made the link to princess caroline of anspark who was the wife of the future george ii she knew princess car. And it's pretty likely that that's how the word spread. If only we had the letter where she said, Princess Caroline,

you should try this. What happened was Mary did her inoculation experiment with a surgeon called Dr. Maitland, who had been out with her in Turkey. And we think of surgeons now, don't we, as kind of very prestigious. But in those days, a surgeon was closer to a butcher, really. So Maitland did the inoculation. He wanted to have doctors there during it, but she was adamant she wouldn't do it. But after little Mary had been inoculated, the daughter had been inoculated, then doctors were allowed to come in. And also these ladies and persons of distinction, who were obviously Lady Mary's friends, court friends, or high society friends. And the word must somehow have trickled through to Princess Caroline about this. Princess Caroline's daughter, Anne, had had smallpox the previous year and nearly died.

So she wanted to protect her two younger daughters. And really, it was because of Lady Mary's abilities as a networker, really, that meant that the whole thing began to spread, because otherwise she could just have inoculated her daughter and nothing could have ever happened beyond that. Does it become public? You mentioned this pamphlet war. How does this start to become a national conversation? April 1721, young Mary was inoculated. Then word reached Princess Caroline and it was decided that an experiment would be done called the Newgate Experiment on six prisoners who had been condemned. I think they would either die or be sent off to Australia.

And it was decided to inoculate them and see how it went. One of them had already had smallpox, so it didn't have any effect. So he unfortunately had to suffer for his crime, but the other five were released. Of course, the press were very, very interested in this. The Tories particularly disliked it because they felt that it wasn't acceptable that these people's lives had been handed over to the doctors to decide whether they were going to live or die. So it was a kind of freedom question for the Tories. And also there was a lot of stuff about the royal family were German,

so anti-German stuff, anti-Turkish stuff. Of course, the clerics didn't like it because it seemed to be playing with nature. So the whole thing was very controversial, and there were lots of pamphlets written at the time and lots of stirring up a feeling about it all. So many kind of modern residents, it's Turkish. Freedom is more important than these scientists and these scribblers. The role that this new science is coming to play in our lives. I mean, there's so many themes here that are still so powerful today. I know, completely.

Yes, absolutely. And of course, another thing was that in Turkey, Mary had been great friends with the French ambassador and his wife. And the French ambassador's wife didn't dare inoculate. And then when she was back in England, Voltaire visited and he wrote a piece praising Lady Mary and saying, if only the French ambassador's wife had been as brave as she had been, she would have done a great service to the French nation. Which again has great parallels, doesn't it? It's amazing. The parallels are all over the place, really, with the Tories. Yeah, you can imagine these Tories feeling just nervous in the face of this kind of new science and understanding that it does change the way that they had lived under around, is this going to lead to mandatory inoculation?

The government literally injecting things into our bloodstreams? And the answer is, yes, it will, buddy. This is the brave new world that we're entering. In terms of now, yes. I mean, it took time for inoculation really to establish itself. The princesses were inoculated a year after young Mary had been. The princesses were inoculated a year after young Mary had been. And then during the 18th century, it grew gradually, but it wasn't prevalent.

It certainly wasn't compulsory. And then there's this guy, Daniel Sutton, and there's been a book about him recently, who kind of made a whole business out of getting everybody inoculated. But that was after Lady Mary died. But it's an interesting thing. Yeah, there's certainly no hint during her lifetime of the state even taking responsibility for inoculation. Presumably, this is just families talking to doctors asking about this new fad. There's no systemic arguments going here, are there? No, no, it was very under the radar, even talking to doctors, because doctors were not very keen on

it. And what Lady Mary realised from the beginning, which is one of the reasons I'm saying she's a scientist in my book, because, you know, the word scientist didn't exist, but that she had worked out that you didn't need to medicalise this process. need to bleed people, you didn't need to purge people, you didn't need to put people on special diets. All you needed to do was do this very gentle little cuts and put the smallpox pus into their bodies and that would cure them and give them lifelong immunity. So the doctors weren't particularly keen on it. And of course, it would mean they wouldn't get their fees, which was another key thing. Because anybody could do it, really. You didn't need to have a medical degree to do it. It was a folk practice. Was she an evangelist for it generally? After she'd let the palace know and done her kids, did she continue to get out there fighting for it? Or was she sort of happy to let the debate

rumble on? Again, it's difficult to trace. Because she was an aristocratic woman, she didn't want to publicise her own role too much. Isabel Grundy, who's an amazing academic, who's done a lot of work on Lady Mary, has proven that she went off to the Wiltshire area, at least, but probably to lots of other places. She was invited to aristocratic households, and she and her daughter used to go and inoculate the whole household. But even there, the daughter wrote about how they were dark looks, people used to jeer at the carriage as they went by and significant shrugs from the servants about it. So even there, it was difficult. And Lady Mary always said that the rest of her

life, it was virtually a day didn't go by where she didn't regret having done it so we think what a wonderful thing but it took its toll on her own life really let's just quickly finish her life i mean she had a remarkable life so i think you probably have to have if you're an educated brilliant woman who wishes to have agency in a kind of misogynist patriarchal culture like that talk to me through some of the adventures that she had i was saying she she eloped with Wortley. In those days, you would have an arranged marriage and her father wanted her to marry someone else, the magnificently named Clotworthy Skeffington. But she knew she didn't want to marry him. So she agreed to elope with Wortley. Although by the time they eloped, she knew she wasn't in love with him anymore. She had been in love with him,

but she wasn't there. So they married and it wasn't the easiest of marriages. And then when she was in her 40s, she fell in love with someone, a young Italian who was only 24, the same age as her son, called Francesco Algarotti. And she left her marriage, pretending she was going abroad for her health and followed him to Europe for 23 years. It didn't actually work out. She didn't realise that he was bisexual but she stayed on in Europe and you know had a great life living out there before she finally returned to Britain. That was kind of the shape of her life. Did she get the credit she deserves really? Did she influence that next generation of public health reformers

who want to take this discovery, if you like, and spread it more widely? Well, I think she did in a sense that if it hadn't been for inoculation, Jenna wouldn't have come up with vaccination. So that then obviously led to something much more prevalent. But you have to think that smallpox wasn't actually worked out until 1980, which is an incredible thing. So Jenner had suffered as a child, he was inoculated, and he had such a terrible time with all this breeding and purging that he decided there must be a better way of doing it. And that's where he made the mental leap to the idea that you could

take cowpox from a cow because it's kind of connected to smallpox and basically inoculate people with cowpox in effect. And that's how vaccination came about. The problem with inoculation was that, and again, this has real parallels for now, that what people didn't really quite grasp was that you were still infectious between the inoculation and the end of when you had your mild disease. So you were supposed to self-isolate. And of course, people didn't really do that. And so it continued to spread. Whereas with vaccination, as soon as you had it, you were okay. You weren't infectious to other people. But the problem with vaccination was it didn't last all your life whereas inoculation did immunity didn't last with vaccination which again is very interesting for us now isn't it oh it's interesting it's interesting and we're just hearing about the Pfizer vaccine maybe not

working very well against the South African variant these are so timely so timely we tend to think the vaccination is just oh his gender came along and then needles went in and that was it, everybody was fine. It absolutely wasn't that. Inoculation and vaccination continued together and it was only in the 1840s that inoculation was banned. Needles didn't feature. They both were done arm to arm.

Literally, they both were putting a little bit of pus in someone's wrist and then passing it to someone else's wrist. When she and her daughters are going around these houses, it's a folky, like my grandmother used to remove warts, you know, in a semi-mystical way that she never told anyone how it was. And it reminds me of that. And you can see that for crusty old Tory magnates, this was just ticking all the wrong boxes for them. They're like, it's voodoo science. It comes from Turkey. It's practiced by women. No interest.

Absolutely. Yes. There was a great guy, William Magstorff, who talked about a few ignorant women It's voodoo science. It comes from Turkey. It's practiced by women. No interest at all. Yes, there was a great guy, William Magstorff, who talked about a few ignorant women do it upon a slender experience, which is just fantastic, isn't it? Yes, definitely. But I often think I wonder how she would feel about anti-vaxxers because for us it's so medicalised, isn't it? And I think she would have taken the vaccination. Of course she would have.

But her own story was very much about beware of doctors. You know, we can do this ourselves, which is quite like the kind of anti-vax thing, isn't it? Yeah, well, it's the right argument for the right time. Because back in them days, doctors were more likely to hurt you than anything else, weren't they? So these men extracting fees to make you more sick. Well, that's it. And she'd gone through that when she had smallpox you know she'd seen them sitting there taking their fees doing absolutely nothing promising her that she would be fine you know etc bleeding her bleeding her wallet and her actual veins yes this is so fascinating thank you for helping to put lady mary back into a position of prominence where she deserves.

Tell me what the book's called. It's called The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montague, Scientist and Feminist. Go and buy it, everyone. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks so much. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and

finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that.

Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.