Former molecular biologist Sandya Narayanswami and Dominic Reid of the British Royal Society were chatting at the cocktail hour the other night when Reid mentioned he was arranging the 350th anniversary celebrations for the Society in 2010. Museum celebrations were planned, he said, as were lectures and television shows celebrating British science. Narayanswami, an Englishwoman now working as a fundraiser for Caltech, worried Reid was leaving somebody out.
"Don't forget to honor Lady Montague--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu," said a smiling Narayanswami, adjusting her dark shawl. Born in 1689, Montagu had traveled to Turkey in 1716, where she wrote a series of famous letters about the Middle East. As wife of the British ambassador, she had access to the harems of the Turkish elite, where she saw women immunizing their children with a traditional smallpox vaccine derived from smallpox pustules. Montagu herself had smallpox, and she wanted to protect her children. "So she had them vaccinated," explained Narayanswami.
Reid listened and nodded. Lady Montagu went on, Narayanswami explained, to push for the Turkish technique to be deployed in Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people were suffering from the raging epidemic. She eventually convinced members of the royal family to vaccinate their family members, thereby popularizing the vaccine.
Even prominent vaccine scientists have given short shrift to Montagu, Narayanswami complained. "I worked at the Wistar Institute [in Philadelphia] and told them about Lady Montagu's role. But everyone always remembers Edward Jenner," she said. That's the famous British doctor who later used a cowpox as the basis for a smallpox vaccine that protected millions. While effective, the technique that Montague helped popularize killed roughly 3% of patients.
Reid was noncommittal on whether to include Montagu in the celebrations. Soon the conversation switched to another figure in British science: King Charles II, who established the Royal Society in 1660. "An enlightened king," said Narayanswami, nodding her approval.
--Eli Kintisch
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