A new book celebrates the trailblazing work of the English aristocrat, who successfully inoculated her daughter
It was a daring and dangerous experiment that paved the way for the development of the first safe vaccine and saved countless lives. Yet when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu deliberately infected her own daughter with a tiny dose of smallpox – successfully inoculating the three-year-old child in 1721 – her ideas were dismissed and she was denounced by 18th-century society as an “ignorant woman” .
Three hundred years later, on the anniversary of that first groundbreaking inoculation on English soil, a new biography will aim to raise the profile of Wortley Montagu and reassert her rightful place in history as a trailblazing 18th-century scientist and early feminist.
If Wortley Montagu hadn’t inoculated her daughter, we may never have gone on to find a cure for smallpox.
Related: Rare letter by Mary Wortley Montagu, pioneering travel writer, up for sale
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