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How Mary Wortley Montagu s smallpox fight paved the way for vaccines
Mary Wortley Montagu championed the use of inoculation against smallpox, but her pioneering work is often overlooked, says
Jo Willett
Michelle D’urbano
WITH the world’s attention on vaccines, now feels like a good moment to sing the praises of an often forgotten contributor to their development. Three hundred years ago this month, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu got her daughter inoculated against smallpox with a technique that was unfamiliar to people in Britain at the time – making her child the first person in the West to be protected in this way. Without Montagu’s willingness to adopt a practice she had learned from other cultures, the introduction of vaccines around 80 years later would never have taken place.
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Health | Leader 31 March 2021
Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
IN COUNTRIES where vaccinations against covid-19 are progressing well, this phase of the pandemic feels a bit like the part of a long-haul flight where the captain has switched on the seatbelt signs and ears are starting to pop. Everyone is impatient to land but there is a way to go yet. The descent will be turbulent, there is still a possibility of disaster and even once we are on the ground, there are many obstacles to negotiate before the journey is over.
Even so, thoughts inevitably turn to what lies beyond the airport. The pandemic has …