Born into wealth and nobility (daughter of the 1st Duke of Kingston), Lady Mary (1689-1762) was given a minimal education by her parents. Whatever learning she eventually posessed, she acquired by her own efforts. She read many of the works in her parents' libraries and she learned Latin by secretly studying a Latin dictionary. In her day, the parents of the bride and groom chose their children's spouses based on social position and wealth (his inheritance for the groom, her dowry for the bride). As was typical, her parents chose the man she was to marry, made the financial arrangements for the new couple, and drew up a marriage contract for her. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, in 1712, Lady Mary eloped to become the wife of the extremely wealthy politician, Edward Wortley Montagu. Despite the romantic beginning, their marriage was not a happy one, even the birth of their son in May 1713 could not resolve their differences.
In 1714, Queen Anne died, bringing the Elector of Hanover to the throne. Her husband was rewarded by being appointed Ambassador to Turkey and the young couple set off for Constantinople. A perceptive spectator, an adventurous tourist, and a fascinated amateur ethnographer, Lady Mary immersed herself in all things Turkish, even learning the language. She visited the zenanas, meeting the upper class women secluded there, in order to learn more about Turkish customs. Her record of her travels, Turkish Embassy Letters, are still considered among the finest specimens of the epistolary genre.
Upon returning home to England, Lady Mary introduced into England the Turkish practice of inoculating healthy children with a weakened strain of smallpox to confer immunity from the more virulent strains of the disease. The dreaded smallpox, which left Lady Mary herself scarred from her 1715 bout with the disease and which killed her brother, often killed its victims or left them scarred or deformed for life.
It was well known that one only got smallpox once. In the Islamic world in Turkey it became the habit to "engraft" people with the dried pustule from smallpox and that this provided protection. Upon learning of the Turkish practice, Lady Mary immediately had her son inoculated. After returning home to England, she introduced the custom to the nobility by having her daughter inoculated, too.
It was safe- but was it effective? One of the women was made to share a bed with a ten-year-old boy with smallpox and she survived with no ill effects thus confirming protection. Queen Caroline then had it tested on orphans and again it was safe. At last the Royal children were inoculated. However inoculation never became common for too often a full-blown case of smallpox was produced.
Edward Jenner (1749-1823) would eventually be given credit for the smallpox vaccine, but it was really Lady Mary who pioneered the approach in western Europe and made it acceptable to the influential, the rich and the powerful. Eventually, the practice of inoculation would filter down to the middle and working classes and would be extended to inoculation against a variety of infectious diseases..
As time passed, more and more people were vaccinated against smallpox, until in 1979, the UN World Health Organization declared that smallpox, that perennial killer, had been eradicated throughout the world. Following in the footsteps pioneered by the health professionals fighting smallpox, vaccines for a host of deadly and deforming diseases including mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio were developed and distributed making so many of the infectious diseases which were early childhood killers a thing of the past, at least in the developed and developing world. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of people owe their lives or their health or the lifes or health of someone close to them to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
She was also a prolific writer of diaries, essays and poems and translated plays from French and Latin. She had a variety of lovers and boyfriends during her travels. But when famed poet and essayist, Alexander Pope, professed his love in a flowery series of letters, Lady Mary did not conceal her derision. Thus was born a public feud that eventually led to financial scandal and Mary leaving England to live in Italy and France until 1761 when her daughter (now wife to the Prime Minister) finally persuaded her to return to London where she died August 21, 1762.