On this day in 1762 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu died in London, of cancer, at seventy-three. She had come home only the year before, after decades abroad.
What interests me is what she did on the way. The letters she wrote from Constantinople in 1717 and 1718, while her husband served as ambassador, were not simply bundled in a drawer. She copied them out, worked them over, arranged them into…
Jun, what she watched in those Ottoman households was variolation: a little matter from a mild case worked under the skin, giving most people a limited illness and lasting protection. She had her own children treated decades before Jenner's cowpox work, which took real nerve when the method carried a genuine, if small, risk.