Turkish Embassy Letters by Mary Wortley Montagu

She garnered some attention for this, after making efforts to publicise the event (and after persuading Newgate Prison authorities to test the procedure on seven (un)lucky prisoners), but has still been passed over in the history books in favour of the British doctor Edward Jenner, who is considered the 'father of immunology' – despite having popularised the process of vaccination nearly eighty years after Montagu first made the theory known in England.MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU: TITLE COMMENTARY Turkish Embassy Letters The procedure proved successful, as you can see from this much later portrait of Edward, who went on to become a traveller in his own right (he left England permanently in 1762 and travelled in the Middle East as an enthusiastic archaeologist, eventually settling in Venice in 1773).Īfter returning to London in 1718, Lady Mary was eager to introduce the method to English doctors, who were at first highly sceptical, even after Lady Mary demonstrated it successfully on her remaining uninoculated child, her daughter Mary (who had been born in Istanbul), in April 1721.

Matthew William Peters (1742–1814) National Portrait Gallery, London She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much matter as can lye upon the head of her needle, and after that binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell.' – Letter from Lady Montagu to Mrs S. the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. 'The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. In 1717 she wrote to a friend about the Ottoman practice of smallpox inoculation – called 'variolation' – long before the procedure was known about in Europe: However, her greatest achievement – and one for which history has not sufficiently rewarded her – was in the field of medicine.

She made the most of her privilege as a woman to access the nuclei of Ottoman life, braving the steamy nudity of the hamam and learning Turkish by infiltrating the harem (women's quarters) of Topkapi Palace, where she befriended the women closest to Sultan Ahmed III and learnt about political machinations hidden from her husband. It is obvious from Lady Mary's correspondence that she would have made a far more successful diplomat than her husband, who was recalled to London after only a year (the couple stayed on an extra year anyway). A European Ambassador in the Second Court of the Topkapi PalaceĪntonio Guardi (1699–1760) (and studio) Government Art Collection

Turkish Embassy Letters by Mary Wortley Montagu