98 Immunity 



experiments date from unknown antiquity and were practised in 

 China and other Oriental countries for the purpose of preventing 

 smallpox. The Chinese method of experimentally producing 

 variolous infection was very crude and consisted in introducing 

 crusts from cases of variola into the nose, and tying them upon the 

 skin. The Turkish method was much more neat, in that a small 

 quantity of the variolous pus was introduced into a scarification 

 upon the skin of the individual to be protected. The following 

 extract is from a letter of Lady Montague,* a wife of the British 

 Ambassador to Turkey, who brought the so-called "inoculation" 

 method from Turkey in the early part of the eighteenth century 

 (1718): 



" Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am 



sure will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal, and so general 

 amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is 

 the term they give it. 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. People send to one another to know if any of their family 

 has a mind to have the smallpox; they make parties for this purpose, and when 

 they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with 

 a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what vein 

 you please to have opened. 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 venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and 

 after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner 

 opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of open- 

 ing one in the middle of the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast, to mark 

 the sign of the cross; but this has a very iU effect, all these wounds leaving little 

 scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who choose to have 

 them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed. The children of young 

 patients play together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the 

 eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, 

 very seldom three. They have very rarely above twenty or thirty [pocks] in 

 their faces, which never mark; and in eight days' time they are as well as before 

 their illness. Where they are wounded, there remain running sores during the 

 distemper, which I don't doubt is a great relief to it. Every year thousands 

 undergo this operation; and the French embassador says pleasantly, that they 

 take the smallpox here by way of diversion,, as they take the waters in other 

 countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it; and you may 

 believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to 

 try it on my dear little son. 



"I am patriot enough to take pains enough to bring this useful invention into 

 fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very 

 particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough 

 to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind. 

 But that distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their resentment 

 the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it." 



By both methods the very disease, variola, against which protection 

 was desired, was induced, the only advantage of the experimental 

 over the accidental infection being that by selecting the infective 

 virus from a mild case of variola, by performing the operation at a 

 time when no epidemic of the disease was raging, and by doing it at 



* See the "Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague;" letter to Miss Sarah 

 Chisives dated Adrianople, April i (O. S.), 1717. 



