“Three hundred years ago, in 1721, England was in the grips of a smallpox epidemic. There were people dying all over the place...social life came to a standstill — and all the things we've suddenly become familiar with again.
But as Londoners cowered inside their homes, there was a woman who knew how to end the outbreak. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and she had learned a technique from women in the distant Ottoman Empire that could stop the pox in its tracks.
What happened next is a tale of politics and public health that bears some ‘depressingly similar’ parallels to the current pandemic. But it also shows how science and determination turned the tide against one of the worst diseases humanity has ever endured.
Smallpox was far deadlier than the coronavirus the world is currently battling. Fatality rates were as high as 30%, and many of the dead were children. Those who survived were often left scarred by the disease, which covered the body in blisters.
But in the 1700s in the Ottoman Empire, centered around modern day Turkey, some women knew how to stop it. These women were part of a vast informal network of female medical professionals. There were a lot of women practitioners in the Ottoman Empire. They were not allowed into the madrassas, Ottoman universities, but they shared knowledge among themselves, working as faith healers, midwives, surgeons and, even in one case, an eye doctor.
What these women knew was this: Take a bit of pus from a smallpox patient and use a needle to scratch a tiny amount just beneath the skin so it gets into the blood of a healthy person. That person would get a mild form of smallpox and become immune to the more serious version.
The practice is strikingly absent from Ottoman medical texts written by men, but accounts that do survive make clear that it was a well-known practice. Women were sharing this knowledge, this know-how, among themselves.
The technique was known as engrafting, variolation or, simply, inoculation. It is thought to have originated in China centuries earlier, and it was also practiced in India and Africa.....”
