LADY MONTAGU AND MODERN BACTERIOLOGY. 363 



ory of its illustrious foundress will be rendered sacred by it to 

 future ages. . . . She consecrated its first effects on the persons 

 of her own fine children ; and has already received this glory from 

 it that the influence of her example has reached as high as the 

 blood royal. It is a godlike delight she must be conscious of 

 when she considers the many thousands of lives that will be saved 

 every year after the general establishment of the practice a good 

 so lasting and so vast that none of those wide endowments and 

 deep foundations of public charity that have made most noise in 

 the world deserve at all to be compared with it." To understand 

 how great the deliverance was, it should be known that then it 

 killed one in seven of all that were born ; it caused about one 

 third of all the blindness in those pitiable victims, and it disfig- 

 ured multitudes frightfully. Mrs. Croasdale, an English lady 

 born early in this century, mentions in a recent book of reminis- 

 cences that in her childhood so many were " pitted " that a per- 

 son with a smooth face was notable. 



Notwithstanding this eulogy from a highly intelligent source, 

 it is pretty certain that, like all those persons who are overmas- 

 teringly possessed with one idea, she was considered an unreason- 

 able " crank." The very friend to whom she wrote the minute 

 description of the process died of smallpox ; and the Lady Mary's 

 sister. Lady Mar, had that most precious of English aristocratic 

 possessions an only son. She offered to inoculate him, and prom- 

 ised to take him into her own house and care for him personally 

 till he should be recovered ; but the sister failed to be convinced, 

 and the boy died in childhood of the disease. 



People still remained so skeptical that Lady Mary used to 

 take her little daughter into houses where people had been inocu- 

 lated, and whose convalescence she was superintending, to prove 

 her own immovable conviction of it as a protective measure. 



At one time such unreasonable prejudices were excited that 

 clergymen and physicians became violent anti-inoculators. Pam- 

 phlets appeared in which it was described as the outcome of 

 " atheism, quackery, and avarice " ; it was denounced from the pul- 

 pit as "an impious interference with the just and inscrutable 

 visitations of God" ; and Dr. Wagstaffe, of St. Bartholomew's Hos- 

 pital, said that " posterity would marvel that a practice employed 

 by a few ignorant women, among an illiterate and unthinking 

 people, should have so suddenly been adopted by one of the politest 

 nations in the world." That this was a narrow and unmerited 

 piece of severity is shown by the facts that these " unthinking " 

 people had discovered that there is a difference in the features of 

 the disease in different cases hcemorrhagic, confluent, discrete, 

 etc. ; that those artificially produced follow closely the character 

 of the cases from which they are planted, each yielding " seed 



