VACCINATION

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Variolation

Lady Mary Pierrepont (1689-1762) defied her father to marry Edward Wortley Montagu.

In 1716 Wortley Montagu was appointed to be the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He took his wife and children with him. Charles Maitland, a Scot, was their household physician. The group learned of the local practice of variolation. This involved the patient's flesh being scratched until blood was expressed. A sample of warm pus that had been taken from a smallpox sufferer was rubbed into the wounds. The patient then experienced a very mild instance of the disease that lasted for several. Thereafter, s/he would be immune to it. Mary Wortley Montagu had lost her brother to the disease and had suffered from itself being left with a pock-marked face and no eyebrows.

In Turkey the Wortley Montagus son was old enough to be variolated but their daughter, Young Mary was held to be too young to undergo the procedure

In 1721 there was a serious outbreak of smallpox. It claimed the lives of a cousin of Mary Wortley Montagu, as well as her Twickenham neighbour James Cragg. She sent for James Maitland, who had been the embassy surgeon. He did not wish to engraft her daughter but deferred to her wishes. For her part, she agreed that the child could be examined by physicians once the procedure had been performed.

Princess Caroline, the wife of the future King George II, indicated that she wished that her children should be engrafted. Before procedure was performed upon the royal princesses, an experiment was performed at Newgate Prison in July on ten life prisoners. It was agreed that if they survived, they would be granted their freedom. Nine went free. The tenth had already had the disease.

Some members of the medical profession embraced the procedure. They tended to medicalise it, purging and bleeding their patients before they underwent it. Mary Wortley Montagu was opposed to this development. However, it was not known that in Turkey, the patient was isolated for several days because s/he might infect others with the disease. As a result, some recently variolated people acted as vectors for its spread. Attitudes towards variolation became linked to party politics. The politically ascendant Whigs supported the opposition Tories opposed it.

In 1755 the Royal College of Physicians endorsed the variolation.

There was a small fatality rate among people who were variolated. In 1783 Octavius, King George III s four-year-old son, died after being variolated for small pox.

Europe s long exposure to small pox meant that much of its population acquired a degree of immunity to the disease. However, there had never been a major outbreak in North America although there had been rare, small outbreaks. During one of these, the young George Washington had contracted it. As a result, he acquired a respect for it. During the early stages of the American Rebellion of 1775-1783 North America became subject to its first widescale outbreak of small pox. This hampered the military efforts; an attempt to force Quebec into embracing the cause during the winter of 1775-6 had to be abandoned because of an outbreak about the Americans. During the Valley Forge winter of 1779-80 Washington ordered his men to be variolated. Numerous slaves escaped to the northern in order to embrace the British cause, however, few of them had immunity and they were not variolated, therefore, many of them died from small pox.

As a child, the physician Edward Jenner was variolated in a medicalised manner. He profoundly disliked the experience. As a result, his mind was predisposed to look for a less distressing alternative. He noticed that dairymaids never contracted smallpox. Therefore, he tried an experiment in which he substituted cowpox pus for smallpox pus.

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Andrew Wakefield

In 1998 The Lancet, a leading medical journal, published Andrew Wakefield s paper that sought to link M.M.R. vaccinations to a supposed subsequent development of autism. Following the material's appearance, it was soon appreciated that the quality of its science was poor. It emerged that Wakefield had failed to disclose a conflict of interests; he was due to serve to act as an expert witness for a group of parents who shared his theory and who were seeking to sue vaccine manufacturers whom they were they believed were responsible for their children's autism. Subsequently, the journal stated that the material about M.M.R. should not have been published.

In 2010 Wakefield was stripped of his licence to practice medicine in the U.K..

Anti-vaxxers vary in what they are hostile to by country. The vaccine might be different but the myths are recycled across cultures.

David Backhouse 2024