Lady+Montague

CP Brit Home


Lady Montague Full Name- Lady Mary Wortley Montague Born- May 15, 1689 Died- August 21, 1762

Lady Montague was an English aristocrat and writer. Montague is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, as wife to the British ambassador.

A number of Lady Mary's poems were printed in her lifetime, either without or with her permission or connivance: in newspapers, in miscellanies, and independently. Her poetry was included in Anthony Hammond’s “New Miscellany of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations, by the most Eminent Hands” (1720). Verses Address'd to the Imitator of Horace, The Reasons that Induced Dr Swift to Write a Poem call'd the ‘Lady's Dressing Room’, and the Answer to the Foregoing Elegy. London Magazine printed a number of her poems.

She wrote a political periodical called the Nonsense of Common-Sense. She wrote Six Town Eclogues, with some other Poems (1747). She was included in Dodsley's Collection of Poems. She wrote notable letters describing her travels through Europe appeared in three volumes from Becket and De Hondt after her death. During the twentieth century Lady Mary's letters were edited separately from her essays, poems, and play, and from her longer fictions.

She wrote a series of poems about society's unjust treatment of women. She had notable correspondence letters to Anne Wortley and courting letters to her future husband Edward Wortley Montague. Love letters to Francesco Algarottim Count Algarotti. She wrote berating letters about the vagaries of fashionable people to her sister By fourteen Lady Mary Wortley Montague had written two books filled with poems, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modeled after Aphra Behn's Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684). She had the ambition of a major writer coupled with influence in rank and society. She was friends with Molly Skerritt, Lady Walpole; John, Lord Hervey; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Abbé Antonio Conti. She was responsible for the introduction of the Turkish inoculation to smallpox into Western medicine. She defied convention most memorably with her pioneering of a smallpox inoculation, a course of action unparalleled in medical advance up to that point.


 * __Smallpox Vaccination in Turkey__**

media type="custom" key="14201514" Written by Lady Montague

A propos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing, that will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless, by the __invention__ of engrafting, which is the term they give it. 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 small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the __best__ sort of small-pox, and asks what __vein__ you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you __offer__ to 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 bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, one in each arm, and one on the breast, to mark the sign of the Cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who chuse to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed. The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark, and in eight days time they are as well as before their illness. Where they are wounded, there remains running sores during the distemper, which I don't doubt is a great relief to it. Every year, thousands undergo this operation, and the French Ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it, and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am patriot enough to take the pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England, and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue, for the good of mankind. But that distemper is too beneficial to them, not to expose to all their resentment, the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps if I live to return, I may, however, have courage to war with them. __**Sources**__ >
 * []