Dr Kat and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

hello and welcome back to the channel if you're new here hi you're very welcome this is reading the past and I'm dr. Kat and today's topic broadly speaking is vaccines and you're probably very aware that for just over 20 years vaccines have been in and out of the news for a variety of reasons but I don't want to look at the past just over two decades I want to go further back for me the very name vaccine actually obscures the history of the thing particularly in Western Europe and in obscuring it it erases a very important woman from it today I want to talk about the legacy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [Music] [Music] as students of history we are going to find ourselves being confronted on a fairly regular basis with the devastating effects of illness and infection of particular notes is the period of the plague also known as the Black Death in the medieval period however you senior pestis which is responsible for plague was not the only big bad out there for centuries smallpox was a terror it killed in the hundreds and thousands and for those it did not kill it would leave them mentally and physically profoundly scarred the terror of smallpox finally came to an end in 1980 that was when the World Health Organization said that it had been globally eradicated but that eradication was only made possible through a consistent program of global vaccination but where does it start Edward Jenner is frequently seen as being the person who creates the vaccine that would see off smallpox however to get there he has to do something that the majority of the medical community would see as being absolutely reprehensible and verboten when in 1796 he encounters a dairymaid Sarah Nelms and Sarah is infected with cow pox Jenna had recognized that those who had contracted cow pox would then seem to be immune from smallpox cow pox is it seems a sister illness to smallpox lesions come up much like the other illness but it is not fatal so Jenna take Sarah Nelms and he removed some pus from one of her lesions he then finds a local boy James fits and inoculates him with this pus to see if it's worked he then exposes young Phipps to smallpox essentially he tested his inoculation on a child we get the word vaccination because the Latin word for cow is vaca the vaccination for smallpox comes from cow pox but in addition to the fact that Edwige emma is behaving in the reprehensible fashion of testing his vaccine on a local child which I think we can all agree is not the way to go in positioning him as a start point I think we lose a greater history we make it seem like Edward Jenner does something that's never been done before and granted by weaponizing cowpox against smallpox he is changing the game however the attempt to avert an infection of smallpox has a much longer history the origins of immunization don't just stretch back into history they also span geography because they are not something that is invented in Europe or in England they are not a product of the West rather they are something that first is found in the East on the 26th of May 1689 a baby girl was baptised she was the daughter of Eve Olympia Pont who would later become the first Duke of Kingston upon Hull and his wife Lady Mary fielding sadly her mother died late in 1692 and at this point little Mary goes to live with her paternal grandmother when she herself also dies she has returned to the care of her father and lives at Thor's be hauled with him in later life little Mary would go on to say that at this point she begins to in quotes steal her education in her father's great library where they think she is busying herself reading The Feminine romances that were so popular she is instead teaching herself Latin by her mid-teens buoyed up by this stolen education the young Mary Pierpoint had produced a rather respectable collection of work both poetry and narrative fiction she'd also amassed a circle of educated female friends and enjoyed a correspondence relationship with two bishops Thomas Tennyson and Gilbert Burnett who supplemented her education which otherwise would have been in the hands of her hated governess in her early 20s Mary's father tried to arrange her marriage to the heir of an Irish peerage the remarkably named clocked worthy Skeffington for one reason or another perhaps the name played a part Mary wasn't keen and so she took matters into her own hands and eloped she married the brother of a friend of hers a woman who had passed away in 1710 his name was Edward Wortley Montagu the date of their marriage is given as the 23rd of August 1712 however by eloping with her Edward Wortley Montagu had given up any claim to a marriage portion that a groom of such a highborn bride might have expected it is said that Mary Wortley Montagu as she was now known felt a deep sense of guilt that her husband had to endure this loss of finances because of his decision to marry her in this way nevertheless the couple's fortunes would not take a complete nosedive they did not find themselves descending into penury and insignificance on the 1st of August 1714 George the first comes the English throne and by new year 1715 Mary Wortley Montagu is welcomed at both the courts of Georgia first and also his son George Prince of Wales unfortunately her success at court was to be short-lived disaster strikes in December 1715 when Mary contracts smallpox during her illness and subsequent recuperation somebody circulates Mary satirical court Eclogues one of these was viewed as being an attack on the Princess of Wales Caroline in doing so the people who saw it as an attack were reading it with a fairly jaundiced eye because the person in the a clog who is mocking Caroline is heavily satirized nevertheless her reputation was ruined she surprised everybody by surviving smallpox but in doing so she came out of it facially scarred and with a ruined reputation it was not the first time that Mary's family had been touched by smallpox about 18 months before she contracted the illness her 20 year old brother had caught it and had died from it with the tragedy of her brother's death her own experience of illness and its aftermath and also her disgrace on the public stage it's believable that Mary Wortley Montagu would have been quite relieved in August 1716 when her husband was sent as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire the couple and their then four-year-old son also named Edward arrived in Turkey in the spring of 1717 it would seem that the period spent overseas was one of profound joy for Mary Wortley Montagu she was fascinated by what she could see and learn from this divergent culture and she threw herself into it wholeheartedly as we can see here Mary was fascinated by the visual landscape of Turkey and the fashions she starts to dress herself and her son in Turkish dark clothing she takes to wearing a turban on her head however it's not simply the material world that interests her because she is also fascinated by the medicine that she sees being practiced in a letter dated to the first of April 1717 Mary recounts the following facts I am going to tell you a thing that will make you wish yourself here the smallpox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless 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 nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asks what rain you please to have opened she immediately ripped open that you offer her with a large needle which gives you no more pain than a common scratch and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle and after that binds up the little wound with a hollow bitter shell the process that lady Mary Wortley Montagu is describing here is inoculation or immunization or perhaps more properly variolation variola major variola minor are the latin names for smallpox the practice of variolation is believed to have begun in China and what it entailed and if you are eating perhaps it's best that you pause this video until you've finished because the practice of variolation involves taking the dried scabs from smallpox victims and blowing them into the nostrils of the person wishing to be immunized against the disease the individual would catch hopefully a relatively benign form of the illness but would then be protected from it at least for a time but this is not exactly what Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes there's nothing being blown up the nose here and that's because the practice has shifted and changed as it's moved across into Turkey and the Ottoman Empire now they introduced these smallpox lesions these dried scabs into the bloodstream and once again the expectation is that a mild form of the illness will occur that will then protect you from greater more dangerous infection in the future of course the procedure is not without risk the intention is to give somebody a small dose of smallpox you expect them to show some symptoms smallpox is an incredibly deadly dangerous illness and as the u.s. Library of Medicine points out about one to two percent of people very elated would go on to die from smallpox however that is a drastic reduction on the estimated 30 percent of people who would die if they contracted smallpox and naturally Lady Mary Wortley Montagu while living in Turkey saw the unscarred faces of the Turkish people around her coming from an England where smallpox was endemic and if you survived if you were lucky enough to survive it would leave you heavily scarred so she must have been in or and it perhaps explains her decision that when she hears in 1718 that her husband and therefore her family have been recalled to England she chooses to her her then five-year-old son very elated in the January of that year while still on embassy she had given birth to a daughter also called Mary perhaps her mother felt that she was too young to undergo the variation herself but she was keen for her son to undergo the procedure and it seems it was successful not only the boy survived but he never contracted smallpox in his lifetime the family of four departed from Turkey bound for England on the 5th of July 1718 with her return to England it seems that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu priorities had shifted prior to being infected with smallpox in December 1715 she had been an active participant at the Royal Court now it seems she was less concerned with royal favour or social climbing instead she dedicated her life to her family and the education of her children however events would overtake her in 1721 it became clear that another smallpox epidemic was Jew at England would be hit while her son had been very elated in Turkey her daughter was not yet immune and so in April 1721 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu convinced Charles Maitland who had been the doctor in the embassy in Turkey to inoculate her child upon the insistence of her mother little Mary was brought before an audience of royal court physicians and was very elated by Charles Maitland now it's obvious that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was concerned for the health of her daughter however she was not averse to using this as a propaganda exercise what she had seen in Turkey had revolutionized the way she thought about medicine she her family and indeed her whole nation had been under the thrall of the threat of smallpox for too long she thought she had a solution she thought she had an answer she wanted to make the variation against smallpox something that her whole nation did as they had done in Turkey she would always I think have intended to very late her daughter as she had done her son but I think she was also aware that by doing so publicly in front of the physicians that would the royal family that she was making a case for this to become more widespread the public variation of little Mary did not of course go unremarked then as now everybody seems to have an opinion particularly when it has to do with what women choose to do for them and their families and a vicious war of words breaks out there are people who see in essentially what they claim to be experimenting on this little girl a child of the nobility of England with these strange Eastern heathen practices something frightening and ultimately a little bit disgusting of course it's not Charles Maitland that bears the brunt of this castigating response no much of the ayah will of course be focused on the mother Lady Mary Wortley Montagu fortunately for all concerned and particularly little Mary the procedure was successful she survived and was rendered immune to smallpox so much so that in later months on the 9th of August 1721 Charles Maitland was given royal permission to conduct further experiments prisoners at new gates were approached and they were told if they underwent the process of variolation then they may find royal favor they all survived the procedure and six months down the line when they were willingly exposed smallpox they were found to be immune Maitland was also in following months given permission to test the procedure on abandoned or orphaned children which he did again to success I'm not quite sure why it seems to be so acceptable to test on children but it seems to be a running theme one that Edward Jenner would later perpetrate as well with the success of these experiments Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 'zed dream of an inoculated population started to come to fruition through this successful variation of the Newgate prisoners and the orphaned and abandoned children Caroline Princess of Wales had enough evidence to successfully petition her father-in-law George the first for permission to violate her own children he of course did not grant permission for her to very late her son's he wasn't about to risk the mail but the daughters were somewhat more disposable and he was alright with that on the 17th of April 17:22 she did very late two of her children Amelia and Caroline the procedure was successful the girls survived and were rendered immune to smallpox unsurprisingly the successful variation of two royal children is something that is in the national interest word begins to spread perhaps it makes smallpox variolation seem less frightening and other certainly it might make it look a little bit fashionable the practice starts to spread however they are still using the live smallpox virus and therefore there's going to be a death hole it's not a hundred percent safe indeed it seems that the way it was practiced was also variable and that may have contributed to the danger some people might have put more of the live virus in and therefore killed the person before the procedure or being a little bit more circumspect they might have put less in rendering the patient not immune to smallpox and enabling them to contract the illness and die from it it's a later date Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complained of the way that some English physicians carried out the practice of variation some would give emetics or purgatives or even bleed their patients before violating them thus they would create a far larger cut than Lady Mary had seen being done in Turkey with the physicians that had carried out variation there is it possible that in these larger cuts more of the virus could get in was variation when practiced using English methods less effective than it was in Turkey because they were making this larger cut was the English version less safe than the Turkish we cannot escape the fact that the practice of our relation was dangerous whether because of poor practice in the process of variation or simply because it required the use of the live virus but what is also true is that lives were saved variation was the best option that English people had at the time indeed it would not be until 1796 with Edward Jenner bringing cow pox as a safe alternative to the live smallpox virus that they would have a safer alternative but in the intervening years countless lives were saved I do wonder however why it is the Edward Jenner gets all the credit alone if without Lady Mary Wortley once accused tireless campaigning in what amounts to almost a proto public relations campaign to normalize variolation if Edward Jenner would even have found a market for his cow pox version but I'd love to know what you think so do let me know in the comment section down below or come and find me over on my social media I'll leave the links in the description box you can follow me there and we can continue the conversation I do hope you found this video interesting and useful if you did then let me know by hitting the thumbs up please also subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon so that YouTube tells you when I've next uploaded I hope you're going to have a great day whatever you're doing and I look forward to speaking to you in my next video take care of yourselves bye bye for now [Music] you [Music]

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Views: 28,321

Rating: 4.9616203 out of 5

Keywords: Mary Wortley Montagu, Smallpox, Vaccine, Edward Jenner, Education, Literature, Culture, History, Early Modern, Renaissance, Women's History, Medical History

Id: rEg3u0xCOvs

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019