Welcome back to my erased women in STEM series, celebrating Science Literacy Week and the upcoming release of my children’s book, THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY.
Explore the full series here:
Rosalind Franklin: DNA Decoder (1920-1958)
Margaret E. Knight: Professional Inventor (about 1837-1914)
Ellen Eglin: A Lost Legacy (1800s)
Eunice Newton Foote: Forgotten Climate Scientist (1819-1888)
Jeanne Baret: Globe Trotting Botanist (1740-1807)
Feeling stabby now? Good. We’re about to discuss the history of vaccination.
In a world where smallpox is effectively extinct, it’s hard to comprehend the devastation it wreaked around the world. Egyptian pharaohs caught the virus. So did Queen Elizabeth I. Spanish and Portuguese explorers introduced the disease to the New World, where it rampaged through Indigenous peoples who had no resistance. During a smallpox outbreak, up to 20 percent of the human population would die from it.
Twenty percent of the population. And for centuries, there was nothing anyone in the Western world could do to stop it.
That began to change on April 1, 1717, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to her friend back home:
The smallpox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of [inoculation]. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation… 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… I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England…
And she did. Lady Mary might not have been the world’s first influencer, but she was certainly among the most passionate, and her advocacy saved countless millions of lives. Including the life of Edward Jenner, who went on to develop a new method of preventing smallpox – the world’s first vaccine.
When I was researching the history of smallpox vaccination, two things jumped out at me.
1) There are layers and layers of erasure happening in this story, driven by disinformation rooted in sexism and racism.
In both Europe and North America, Edward Jenner and other white men got the credit and the accolades…
…but a white woman, Lady Mary, came before them and paved the way for their success.
And women of colour, in the Ottoman Empire and in Africa, came before Lady Mary. As far as I’ve been able to discover, no one in Europe or North America even bothered to record those woman’s names. (Or the names of African men who were also doing the work.)
If that weren’t bad enough:
2) The frenzied rhetoric and resistance to public health measures for smallpox were almost identical to the frenzied rhetoric and resistance to public health measures for COVID. And I’m talking everything from isolating to masks to vaccines.
Seriously, ya’ll. Three hundred years have gone by and nothing has changed.
Tomorrow, I’ll wrap up this series with Trota of Salerno: Mistress of Medieval Medicine. Plus, a FREE resource: the Canadian Women in STEM Reading List for Kids – perfect for Science Literacy Week and Women’s History Month!
Meanwhile, you can read more about Lady Mary and her unnamed predecessors in THE MATILDA EFFECT. And be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter to receive a FREE Women’s History Month Resource Kit!Subscribers who pre-order THE MATILDA EFFECT get some extra bonus goodies, too, including an exclusive ticket to the virtual book launch.