Today’s Variolated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a London socialite and wife of a member of Parliament, brought the practice of variolation (a method of immunizing patients against smallpox by infecting them with substance from the pustules of patients with a mild form of the disease) to England. A famous beauty in her youth, she had contracted smallpox in December 1715 at the age of twenty-six, after her younger brother had died of the disease. She survived the ordeal, but at the cost of severe facial scarring and the loss of her eyelashes. In 1717, Lady Montagu accompanied her husband to Constantinople (now Istanbul), where he had been appointed British ambassador. Two weeks after her arrival, she became familiar with the practice of variolation at the Ottoman court and sent a letter to a friend describing the procedure. “Every year,” she wrote, “thousands undergo this operation, and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.”
Lady Montagu
Determined to protect her five-year-old son Edward from smallpox, Lady Montagu ordered the embassy surgeon, Dr. Charles Maitland, to variolate the boy in March 1718. The operation was performed while her presumably skeptical husband was away and despite the strong opposition of the embassy chaplain, who considered the procedure un-Christian. Fortunately, it was successful. After returning to London, she had Dr. Maitland variolate her three-year-old daughter in the presence of physicians from the royal court.
Variolation in Action!
In 1721, despite resistance from the medical establishment, Lady Montagu persuaded the scientifically minded Princess of Wales and her husband to sponsor a public experiment to demonstrate the safety of variolation. This proposal fell on receptive ears because of the disastrous impact of smallpox on the British succession, including the death in 1700 of Queen Anne’s son and sole surviving heir. The Princess of Wales offered a full pardon to six condemned prisoners facing the gallows at Newgate Prison in London on the condition that they serve as subjects in what was called the Royal Experiment. The prisoners agreed, and in August 1721 they were variolated in front of an audience of physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and members of the press.
All six subjects recovered from the procedure with no ill effects and were duly pardoned. To demonstrate the protective effects of variolation, one of the subjects, a nineteen-year-old woman, was ordered to sleep in the same bed with a ten-year-old smallpox victim for six weeks but did not contract the disease. Persuaded by this demonstration, the Princess of Wales had the king’s surgeon inoculate her two young daughters, princesses Amelia and Caroline, on April 17, 1722. Thanks in part to the royal example variolation became popular in England by the 1740s. The procedure was not widely accepted on the European continent, however, until after King Louis XV of France died suddenly of smallpox in 1774.
Culled from: Scourge
A Word from the Good Book
My favorite book is Wisconsin Death Trip, a collection of 19th century newspaper articles from Black River Falls, Wisconsin accompanied by glass plate negatives taken by the town photographer in the same era. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
“The funeral services of the little child of Jimmie McWilliams that died last Friday was held at his house last Sunday… The whole community deeply sympathize with Mr. McWilliams and wife in this doubly deep-pained affliction, this being their only boy, and the fourth one that death had taken from them during the past few years. Surely this is the point where faith must take the place of reason.” [8/27/1891, Badger State Banner]
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
July 4th. Very hot. We didn’t celebrate the “glorious 4th” by feasting, but roasting half of our pint of meal for breakfast, made mush of the other half for dinner, and had raw pork for supper. The detachments were reorganized, and ours is now the 63d. In place of the usual fire-works in the evening, over thirty thousand filled the night air with songs of “John Brown’s Body,” “Star-Spangled Banner,” “Down with the Traitors,” etc., cheers for Vicksburg and Gettysburg victories of a year ago.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost