Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/378

362 Macaulay has this eloquent passage on this disease when describing the miseries of the old times: "Smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, leaving in those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to her lover." No wonder that the Lady Mary underscores the part which says it leaves no mark—a womanly touch for which we love her.

She had Mr. Maitland, surgeon to the embassy, procure variolous matter from a suitable subject, and a very experienced old Greek woman was employed to insert it; she inoculated one arm and Maitland the other; the disease ensued in due course, with the production of about a hundred pustules. This was the first time that the Byzantine method was employed on an English subject.

Mr. Montagu was attending to his ambassadorial duties at Belgrade at the time, and she wrote to him on March 23, 1718: "The boy was ingrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing, very impatient for his supper; I pray God my next may give as good an account of him. I can not ingraft the girl; her nurse has not had the smallpox." Persons who have smallpox by inoculation impart it to others just as if they had acquired the disease in the natural manner, but we may be quite sure that the little lady was submitted to the operation that would preserve her beauty as soon as possible after she was weaned. Her husband being politically promoted, they returned to England after having lived in Turkey but little more than a year, and Dr. Maitland at once endeavored to establish the practice in London, being enthusiastically seconded and supported by her. Not till 1781, as its expediency had been agitated by scientific men, was an experiment sanctioned by the College of Physicians and allowed by Government. Five persons condemned to death willingly encountered the danger, with the hope of life. Upon four of them the eruption appeared on the seventh day; the fifth was a woman on whom it never appeared, but she confessed that she had had the disease when an infant. Lady Mary strove so earnestly to introduce the practice among mothers of her own rank in life that we learn from her letters that much of her time was given up to consultations and superintending the success of her plans. Steele, in his Plain-Dealer of July 3, 1734, wrote of her: "It is an obserxationobservation [sic] of some historian that England has owed to women the greatest blessings she has been distinguished by. In the case we are now upon this reflection will stand justified. We are indebted to the reason and courage of a lady for the introduction of this art, which gains such strength in its progress that the