362 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Macaulay has this eloquent passage on this disease when de- 

 scribing the miseries of the old times: "Smallpox was always 

 present, filling the churchyards with corpses, leaving in those 

 whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the 

 babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and mak- 

 ing the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror 

 to her lover." No wonder that the Lady Mary underscores the 

 part which says it leaves no mark a womanly touch for which 

 we love her. 



She had Mr. Maitland, surgeon to the embassy, procure vario- 

 lous matter from a suitable subject, and a very experienced old 

 Greek woman was employed to insert it; she inoculated one arm 

 and Maitland the other ; the disease ensued in due course, with 

 the production of about a hundred pustules. This was the first 

 time that the Byzantine method was employed on an English 

 subject. 



Mr. Montagu was attending to his ambassadorial duties at Bel- 

 grade at the time, and she wrote to him on March 23, 1718 : " The 

 boy was ingrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and 

 playing, very impatient for his supper ; I pray God my next may 

 give as good an account of him. I can not ingraft the girl ; her 

 nurse has not had the smallpox." Persons who have smallpox 

 by inoculation impart it to others just as if they had acquired the 

 disease in the natural manner, but we may be quite sure that the 

 little lady was submitted to the operation that would preserve her 

 beauty as soon as possible after she was weaned. Her husband 

 being politically promoted, they returned to England after hav- 

 ing lived in Turkey but little more than a year, and Dr. Maitland 

 at once endeavored to establish the practice in London, being 

 enthusiastically seconded and supported by her. Not till 1781, as 

 its expediency had been agitated by scientific men, was an experi- 

 ment sanctioned by the College of Physicians and allowed by 

 Government. Five persons condemned to death willingly en- 

 countered the danger, with the hope of life. Upon four of them 

 the eruption appeared on the seventh day ; the fifth was a woman 

 on whom it never appeared, but she confessed that she had had 

 the disease when an infant. Lady Mary strove so earnestly to 

 introduce the practice among mothers of her own rank in life 

 that we learn from her letters that much of her time was given 

 up to consultations and superintending the success of her plans. 

 Steele, in his Plain-Dealer of July 3, 1724, wrote of her : " It is an 

 obserxation of some historian that England has owed to women 

 the greatest blessings she has been distinguished by. In the case 

 we are now upon this reflection will stand justified. We are in- 

 debted to the reason and courage of a lady for the introduction of 

 this art, which gains such strength in its progress that the mem- 



