Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Scientific Lady

(Lady Montagu herself had suffered its ravages as a teenage woman.) Upon her return to England, she introduced variola major virus inoculation to that country, using her social mail service to encourage the practice among the highest ranks of a stratified society. Princess Caroline, daughter of king George I, had her own children inoculated upon Lady Montagu's suggestion.

In spite of this accomplishment, Lady Montagu--though long-familiar to students of Englightenment England's literature--has been essentially forgotten by the world of science. The Dictionary of scientific Biography, for example, has no entry for her. Some references on the history of smallpox treatment fail to mention her completely, while others refer yet briefly to her pioneering work. We will return at the conclusion of this canvass to consider possible reasons for her undeserved obscurity. In order to gauge those reasons, however, we must first consider the circumstances under which she had her contribution, and how the combination of class and gender influenced her career.

From an early age, Lady bloody shame Wortley proved herself to be a strong-willed and independent individual. Her mother died when she was a child, and her father, the Duke of Kingston, took little interest in his children, but Mary enlightened herself in his library. In her teens she began a correspondence with Anne Wortley Montagu, granddaughter of the first Earl of Sandwic

Hopkins, D. R. (1983). Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History. Chicago: University of Chicago.

part in four of all her acquaintance. (Alic, 1986, p. 91)

that they take the smallpox here(predicate) by way of diversion as

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1977). Court Eclogs, Written in the Year, 1716: Alexander Pope's Autograph manuscript of Poems by Lady Mary Montagu. R. Halsband, ed. New York: Readex.

here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting

the most Learned and elegant Nations in the World as to

and upon a slender Experience, so far obtain in one of

It must overly be noned, however, that Lady Montagu lived at a time when the take of educated women had reached a sort of critical mass, with dramatic personal effects at least in literature. These women were the primary audience for the novel, hence a new genre (hence its name); early novels such as Richardson's were indeed a novelty in having female protagonists, and in centering on the experiences and predicaments faced by women, rather than on those of men. Moreover, whatever the received wisdom of the time demanding women's intellectual capacities, neat intellectuals such as Pope were evidently willing to get Lady Montagu not only in their personal wad (where, admittedly, romantic entanglements were a factor), but also willing to regard her literary efforts as worthy of attention.

In 1716, Lord Montagu was institute the British Ambassador to Ottoman Turkey; a contemporaneous portrait shows her in Turkish costume. Lady Montagu accompanied him, and the observing eye displayed in her letters from Turkey (she even gained accession to the Sultan's harem, and wrote an account of it that surely titillated her male contemporaries) made her literary reputation. But her most important observations in Turkey were not of the harem. In a letter to Sarah Chiswell she wrote that

old women who make it their parentage to perform the operation ... Every year thousand
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