The jab that saved countless lives 300 years ago

This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so impressed by the Turkish technique of ‘engraftment’ to prevent smallpox that in 1721, exactly 300 years ago, she arranged for the first such inoculation in England — and, even more controversially, had it carried out on her own three-year-old daughter. Smallpox pus from a sufferer was carried in a walnut shell and applied to a cut made in her daughter’s arm.

She discovered the technique too late to use it on herself. As a young woman and court beauty, she had contracted smallpox during one of the frequent epidemics that swept London, leaving her scarred and without any eyebrows. This gave her what contemporaries described as ‘the Wortley stare’, a penetrating gaze which, allied with her fierce intelligence, made her a formidable proposition.

Together with Princess Caroline, the wife of the future George II, she embarked on a campaign to persuade a deeply reluctant British public that the process was safe.