Vaccines were first introduced in England by a feminist writer-poet, and in America by an African man enslaved in Boston.
But history still only talks about Edward Jenner…
With the state of vaccination and how endless the debate over their use is defining our covid-era, I was thinking about the origins of vaccines, the history we have been told about their ‘discovery,’ and how the collective blindness of that history is a symptom of the systemic racism and misogyny we’re still grappling with. I wonder if people would be more inclined to vaccinate if they knew an accurate history of vaccines — that it has been practiced in some form for thousands of years in China, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the Middle East before it was brought to England by the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1717, and to North America by an enslaved African man, Onesimus, in 1721?
Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet, known today primarily for her letters describing her travels to the Ottoman Empire as wife of the British ambassador to Turkey. Her letters are thought to have inspired subsequent women travelers and writers; she described in detail the customs, fashions, and religious practices she observed, giving accounts that were particularly interested in the roles of women — believing that male travelers had misrepresented the traditions and treatment of women in the country.
In one account she relays that the Turkish women at a bath were horrified by the stays she was wearing:
they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.
In 18th century England, fatalities from the disease varied, ranging from 20–60%; in infants, it was even higher — as much as 80% in London and up to 98% in Germany. Survivors of the disease were most often left disfiguring scars. Montagu had been disfigured from smallpox as a young woman and had lost her only brother to the disease. In a poem after her recovery she wrote:
The wretched Flavia on her Couch reclin’d,
Thus breath’d the Anguish of a wounded mind.
A Glass revers’d in her right hand she bore;
For now she shunn’d the Face she sought before.
How am I chang’d! Alas, how am I grown
A frightfull Spectre to my selfe unknown!
During her travels and months in Turkey, Montagu was a keen observer. She visited women’s baths and the segregated zenanas, making friends and learning about Turkish customs. She observed how the women she knew had no scars marking their skin — which was rare to see in England.
When she asked about it, women told her it was common practice to be inoculated as a child — to have the pus from smallpox grafted into a scratch on the arm, often done by older Greek and Armenian women as a ‘folk practice.’ She asked to witness it being done, and wrote letters home describing the procedure:
There is a set of old women [here], who make it their business to perform the operation, every autumn…when then great heat is abated…thousands undergo this operation…[and there] is not one example of anyone that has died in it.
She was so convinced by it that she had her five-year-old son inoculated while in Turkey, and he became successfully immune to the disease that had so impacted her early life.
When Montagu returned to London, she was enthusiastic about the promise of inoculation and advocated for it widely. But unsurprisingly given the amount of distrust and misinformation that we see today, she encountered resistance from the male medical establishment because it was a ‘folk treatment’ — and no doubt because she was a woman.
Undeterred, when a smallpox outbreak arrived in 1721, she had the same procedure done on her daughter and publicized it, inviting physicians and friends to witness her daughter’s speedy recovery — the first recorded inoculation in England (although once accounts of inoculation in England were circulated, Welsh doctors affirmed that inoculation has been practiced in Wales for some time, and was considered an ‘ancient practice’). Despite the success of Montagu’s daughter and son’s immunity, there was continued disparagement and skepticism around inoculation. Whigs became pro-inoculation, while the Tories became anti-inoculation — an eerily familiar politicization of science and medicine.
Montagu continued to publicly advocate, writing and publishing an article that outlined the process and its success. Montagu’s position in society gave her closer access to the royal family, and she was able to persuade Caroline, the Princess of Wales, to inoculate her own two daughters in 1722. Because of the visible success of the royal family’s inoculation and immunity, other royal families later followed and supported inoculation; much later Catherine the Great of Russia had herself and her son inoculated. The adoption by such public figures caused inoculation to become more widely accepted and practiced.
Despite the success of Montagu’s efforts to bring the practice of vaccination to England, there was still inherent risk in the procedure, given that it used smallpox as the agent of inoculation. Deaths could still occur and the recipient would still invariably experience a milder form of smallpox. This is when Edward Jenner enters the picture, who was 13 when Montagu died. He later built on the practice that Montagu introduced to England, and discovered that he could use a less virulent form of cowpox as the agent, which produced fewer symptoms and reduced the possibility of death from inoculation — a true vaccine.
Lady Mary Montagu was a change agent on several fronts — not the least of which as a writer and poet. While best known for her Turkish Embassy Letters she also wrote poetry, plays, and essays — a number of which were printed in her lifetime, either without or with her permission. Her letters, published after her death, were widely successful: the first edition sold out, and the Critical Review editor wrote that the letters were “never equaled by any letter-writer of any sex, age or nation.” Voltaire also had high praise for Montagu’s letters. Still, some male peers, such as Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole made Montagu the target of vicious attacks.
Pope, in particular, may have had other reasons for resenting Montagu’s posthumous success. Montagu had met Alexander Pope prior to her move to Turkey, and Pope was seemingly fascinated by her wit and elegance. They corresponded during her travels, but Montagu’s replies are reserved — she was clearly less impressed with Pope and did not return his gushing admiration. When she returned to England, few letters passed between them, suggesting an estrangement. Unable to let the matter go, Pope then embarked on a decade of attacks on Montagu, beginning with those made in his Dunciad, and most of his publications made some sort of allegation against her following that time.
Montagu’s descriptions in the Turkish letters were influential in claiming the authority of women’s writing, with their access to private homes and women-only spaces, such as the bathhouses. Her published letters include the subtitle Sources that Have Been Inaccessible to Other Travellers. She asserts this in her letters explicitly, writing:
You will perhaps be surpriz’d at an Account so different from what you have been entertained with by the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don’t know…trite observations…[by] superficial boys [who] only remember where they met the best wine or the prettiest women.
She wrote that the baths were akin to a woman’s coffee house, where news is discussed and stories shared, admiring the social freedom it offered to women. She wrote admiringly of local customs, and adopted the local style of dress, describing its comfort in contrast to the corsets that were popular for women in England and across Europe at the time.
Across the Atlantic almost within the same year as the inoculation of Montagu’s son, an enslaved African man was given to the Puritan minister Cotton Mather (the same Cotton Mather of Salem witch trial fame). Renamed Onesimus by his enslaver, it’s believed that Onesimus was kidnapped from West Africa, and was perhaps of the Coramantee, or Akan people of modern Ghana. Mather was impressed with Onesimus and, believing that all enslaved people should be brought to Christianity, taught him to read and write.
Around 1716, Mather asked Onesimus if he had had smallpox, and Onesimus replied “yes and no.” A form of inoculation against smallpox — variolation — had been practiced across sub-Saharan Africa for centuries, and Onesimus described how it was done: a drop of smallpox from an infected person was smeared into a cut in a healthy person. The practice of smallpox inoculation continued among enslaved communities of colonial America, but it was not widely known or accepted by white colonists and physicians.
Mather was fascinated by Onesimus’ description of inoculation and wrote to physicians in England who were also researching the practice due to Montagu’s advocacy. When a smallpox epidemic erupted in Boston in 1721, Mather advocated for inoculation amongst the colonial community, citing the evidence that Onesimus had shared. But people were resistant to the idea, fearful that it would only spread disease among the healthy, or worse, interfere with God’s plan — and many were suspicious of medicinal practices from Africa.
Fears of a slave rebellion fueled suspicion and derision of the practice — many were convinced that Onesimus’ testimony of inoculation was a ploy to overthrow and poison the colonists (conspiracy theories abounded then as well as now). Physicians dismissed it entirely. Mather was ridiculed for believing the words of the enslaved. James Franklin1 — brother to Benjamin Franklin — was the editor of a new paper, The New-England Courant, that was uninhibited in its ire for Mather and his patrician tactics, not the least of which for his role in the Salem witch trials. Threats even turned to violence at one point, when a bomb was thrown into Mather’s home (but did not explode).
Despite the prevailing negative view of inoculation, one Boston surgeon — Zabdiel Boylston — did believe Mather and Onesimus, and he successfully inoculated his son and two enslaved people. With Boylston and Mather’s persistence, more than 242 people were inoculated during the outbreak, with only six deaths — a dramatic result in a disease that was causing the death of more than 14% of the population at the time.
The practice that Onesimus shared with Mather — and that was eventually confirmed by the medical community and the numbers of healthy inoculated people — not only introduced the concept of inoculation to the colonies but also helped to overturn racial assumptions. Historian Ted Widmer has gone so far as to say that in sharing the wisdom of inoculation with Mather, “Onesimus reversed many of [the colonists’] traditional racial assumptions… [h]e had a lot more knowledge medically than most of the Europeans in Boston at that time.”
Despite his contribution to the health of so many, Onesimus falls out of history with little more information — it is believed he was eventually able to purchase his freedom, but that Mather distrusted him and claimed he still owed him money.
With the wisdom of inoculation reaching across continents, introduced by a woman writer in England and an enslaved man in the Colonies at roughly the same time, a decrease in mortality from smallpox grew. And, after Edward Jenner’s development of vaccination through a weaker form of the disease, vaccination became compulsory in Wales and England. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared that smallpox had been completely eradicated due to immunization efforts across the globe.
We need to know these voices from the past. Montagu and Oenismus bore witness to practices that they had seen save lives. Yet another reason why we are left with enormous gaps in knowledge when women and minorities — both in the past and the present — are silenced.
Read more at the Ariadne Archive
Links:
A recent biography of Montagu
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/how-mary-wortley-montagus-bold-experiment-led-to-smallpox-vaccine-75-years-before-jenner
https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/articles/the-origins-of-inoculation/
https://www.the-scientist.com/foundations/introducing-inoculation-1721-68275
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/17/how-african-slave-helped-boston-fight-smallpox/XFhsMMvTGCeV62YP0XhhZI/story.html%C2%A0
https://web.archive.org/web/20090114071421/http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=942
https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather
Isabel Wilkerson. Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Mary_Wortley_Montagu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onesimus_(Bostonian)
1 In one of the many overlapping connections in history, Benjamin Franklin would later reverse course from his brother’s views, becoming an advocate for inoculation, particularly after his son died from smallpox. Additionally, Boylston had made Benjamin Franklin a crucial loan while he was in London years later — despite that Benjamin and James Franklin had attacked Boylston and Mather’s efforts to promote inoculation. Franklin later believed that the loan saved his life.
