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When the entire world is waiting for an effective COVID vaccine, let us remember Lady Mary, who sparked the idea of vaccination almost 300 years back and incidentally during another pandemic !!

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey. She was a writer, poet, and a keen observer. At that time, smallpox was raging Europe. It is now estimated that the disease had killed around 500 million people in the last 100 years. The name “smallpox” was given by Britons in the 16th century, to distinguish it from another deadly disease of that time– syphilis, which was called great pox. Lady Mary’s only brother died from smallpox in 1713, and she narrowly escaped from this deadly disease, but with a disfigured face.

During her stay in Turkey, she observed a strange practice -“ inoculation against smallpox.” The people used to take the pus from the blister of a smallpox patient and used to apply that into scratched or abraded skin of arm or leg of a normal, healthy person. The popular belief was that this method provides immunity to the disease, or the inoculant will get a milder form of the disease. Though Mary observed it in Turkey, the practice of inoculation is believed to originate in China and India long back. The detailed description of inoculation ( which she named as engrafting) is available in Mary’s letters written to her friends.

Being a victim of smallpox in the past, Mary was desperate to save her children from the disease. So Mary decided to try this technique in her children. In March 1718 and in April 1721, she inoculated her 5-year-old son, Edward, and her daughter, Mary, with the help of the British embassy doctor Dr. Charles Maitland. Lady Marry had documented this observation in her writing and she could convince Princess of Wales about the effectiveness of her technique. As a result, two daughters of Princess got inoculated and many people started practicing this technique. There were no clinical trials in those days, but there were subjects !! In August 1721, seven prisoners at Newgate Prison awaiting death sentence were offered the chance to undergo inoculation with smallpox pus instead of execution: they all survived and were released subsequently.

Edward Jenner, credited for developing the first successful vaccine, was only 13 years old when Lady Mary died.

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1. The Drug Book by Michael C. Gerald

2. Wikipedia

3. A brief history of vaccines & vaccination in India