Note 1 — Chapter I · MY HOME IN ASIA MINOR.
Reading edition
Writing to England from Adrianople on April 1, 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says:—
"A propos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins.... The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health until the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, or seldom three. They have rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark; and in right days' time they are as well as before their illness.... There is no example of anyone that has died in it; and you may well believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of the experiment, since I intend to try it on my little son.
"I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England."