The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the early eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey, was herself affected by the pox, her perfect skin left pitted with lesions. In Turkey, she witnessed variolation in practice and, on April 1, 1718, wrote to her lifelong friend Mrs. Sarah Chiswell in wonder: 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.18 … The old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein 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 matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that, binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell, and in this manner opens four or five veins. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark, and in eight days time they are as well as before their illness. Where they are wounded, there remains running sores during the distemper, which I don’t doubt is a great relief to it. Every year, thousands undergo this operation, and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one that...