‘A thankless enterprise’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's campaign to establish medical unorthodoxy amongst her female network

Abstract

Scholarship on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her involvement in the introduction of smallpox inoculation into 1720s English society generally concurs that, were it not for Montagu, inoculation might never, or would have taken significantly longer to, come about. This article argues that whilst Montagu can take the credit for popularizing the notion of inoculating against smallpox, it was not the method she personally introduced that ended up becoming general practice. Her ‘Turkish’ technique was shunned, not just by the male medical elite, but by those in her female network. For whilst they were evidently convinced by the idea of inoculation, they were not prepared to apply her foreign method, which strayed so considerably outside the bounds of what made sense to them intellectually and morally. Sanctioning a version of inoculation that adhered to the tenets of humoral medicine, they effectively advanced an ‘English’ version of it. These findings not only nuance the true nature of Montagu's contribution to the introduction of smallpox inoculation, but also reveal the extent to which its success depended upon the knowledge, experience and say-so of the female circle who first adopted it.