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 albums ravelogue in the shape of correspondence and on her last journey back she left a copy behind in Rotterdam with a clergyman she trusted. They appeared in print in 1763, the year after her death, which is exactly the timing a careful author would choose. Her family, I gather, would have preferred otherwise. The book has never really been out of circulation since.
She is also the reason a good many English readers first met the practice of smallpox inoculation, which she had watched in Turkey and described in a letter home. The old word for it was engrafting, borrowed from orchards. The pastel below shows her in Turkish dress, reclining, fan folded, slippers off. Very composed. So was the manuscript.
Jun, one detail she noticed carefully: the engrafting she watched was arranged by older women, who gathered a dozen people together in a house each autumn, opened the vein with a needle and a nutshell of matter, and kept the day social. She wrote that the Turks made a diversion of it, the way one might of a feast.
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.