How Did Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Stay In Letters

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat born in 1689. She was a letter writer and a poet, most famously known for her letters about her travels to the Ottoman Empire. She was an inspiration to many female travelers and writers. She was wife of the British ambassador in Turkey, Edward Wortley Montagu. She was also well known for introducing smallpox inoculation to Britain after her return from Turkey. One of her famous letters that are read until today is the letter addressed to Miss Sarah Chiswell, in which she describes her stay in Turkey and the process of smallpox vaccination. This letter was written on the first of April in the year 1717. Lady Mary starts the letter by reproaching Miss Sarah for not writing replying to her letter. She

She witnessed this practice and wrote many letter to Britain about it. The small pox virus was taken from a person having a mild case of the virus and put into an uninfected person’s body through a scratch to create and immunity against it. Lady Montagu had many negative encounters with the disease; her brother passed away in 1713, and her own beauty was ruined in 1715 after contracting the disease. She had her five year old son inoculated, and on her return to England she advocated the procedure, but met a huge number of rejecters. She then had her daughter inoculated and it was the first operation of this sort in Britain. She tried convincing some people to go through the process and succeeded eventually. The process was also tried on seven prisoners waiting for execution, and as a result it worked and they were freed. Lady Mary also wrote an article advocating inoculation in response of the rejection of the process under a pseudonym. She had an interesting and engaging style of writing that attracted many readers to her travel