Abstract
In 1722, after initial successful experiments with inoculation (on Newgate prisoners and parish orphans) encouraged medical practitioners to attempt the procedure on the children of their wealthy clients, the prominent physician William Wagstaffe expressed his public disapprobation of the method in an ‘open letter’ to one of his colleagues at the Royal College of Physicians, who was also sceptical about the practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Although, it should be noted that with the exception of a flippant remark in his History of Physick, John Freind (Wagstaffe’s addressee) remained civil throughout the debates and on good terms with supporters of the practice, notably Dr Richard Mead.
- 2.
(1722) A Letter to Dr. Freind; Shewing the Danger and Uncertainty of Inoculating the Small Pox (London: S. Butler), p. 1.
- 3.
(1910) ‘The Traveller‘, in The Poems and Plays of Oliver Goldsmith (London: J. M. Dent), p. 142.
- 4.
However, as Allan Ingram notes in Chap. 8, Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford, is quoted in David Shuttleton’s (2007) Smallpox and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) as asserting, ‘Inoculation is at present more in fashion than ever.’ As Deborah Brunton notes, ‘The practice was initially taken up among the upper classes who could afford the high fees charged by practitioners, then spread slowly down the social scale as the procedure was simplified.’ See Brunton (1999) ‘The Problems of Implementation: The Failure and Success of Public Vaccination against Smallpox in Ireland, 1840–1873’, in E. Malcolm and G. Jones (eds), Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland 1750–1950 (Cork: Cork University Press), pp. 138–57.
- 5.
(2006) Medicine-by-Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Century British Consultation Letters and Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi), p. 59. Wild refers specifically to prominent physicians such as Adair and Thomas Beddoes.
- 6.
G. Miller (1957) The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 65.
- 7.
See Caroline Evans’ discussion of ‘the deathliness of fashion’ in (2007) Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness (Ithaca: Yale University Press), p. 187.
- 8.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of fashion identifies it as ‘Conventional usage in dress, mode of life, etc., esp. as observed in the upper circles of society; conformity to this usage. Often personified, or quasi-personified.’
- 9.
(1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage), p. 9.
- 10.
Wagstaffe observed that ‘they that have been Inoculated, do not appear so healthy, as those who have had the Small Pox by the natural Infection. Many who have had a favourable opinion of it, have alter’d their Minds; and the Inoculated are pointed at as Persons having something Singular.’ Wagstaffe, pp. 14–15.
- 11.
(1722) A Sermon Against the Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation. Preach’d at St. Andrew’s Holborn, On Sunday, July 8th, 1722 (London: W. Meadows).
- 12.
(1722) Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox Vindicated, from Dr. Wagstaffe’s Misrepresentations of that Practice, with Some Remarks on Mr. Massey’s Sermon (London: J. Peele), p. 49.
- 13.
Noting that ‘More people [in this period] were being born in the presence of a medical attendant, more were dying with the ministrations of a physician rather than a priest’, Roy Porter argues that the ‘The Enlightenment […] sped the medicalization of life and death’ (1999) The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: Norton), p. 302.
- 14.
For a concise account of the ‘innate seed theory’, see G. Miller’s history and, more recently, David Shuttleton’s informed discussion in Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660–1820, pp. 31–33.
- 15.
In his seminal work on smallpox, Shuttleton refers to the ‘traditional models which considered smallpox to be the purging of the maternal legacy of an innate germ of corruption’ (p. 206).
- 16.
Referring to the ‘strongly theatrical character of the early inoculation experiments’, Wilson (1990) contends that ‘inoculation was political massage as well as medical intervention’, ‘The Politics of Medical Improvement in Early Hanoverian London’, in A. Cunningham and R. French (eds), The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 33.
- 17.
As Shuttleton writes at the outset of his study, ‘the power of smallpox to leave permanent disfigurement’ induced a sense of panic in regard to the ‘nauseating phantasmagoria of rotting, eruptive, and squamous skin that constituted the actual bodyscape in the eighteenth century’ (p. 1).
- 18.
(1767) The Practice of Inoculation Recommended, in a Sermon, Preached At St. James’s, Westminster, April the 9th, 1767, on the Anniversary Meeting of the Governors of the Small-Pox Hospitals (London: W. Faden), p. 20.
- 19.
It is noteworthy that this view of inoculation as an extension of providence was able to cut across the spectrum of Protestant beliefs, and that Cotton Mather, a Boston Puritan reacting to a smallpox outbreak in the 1720s, could advance a religious justification of inoculation as similar to that which the controversial Anglican minister William Dodd would articulate nearly 50 years later. Mather’s position reflects a more nuanced Puritan position that medicine and religion were reconcilable and complementary, although his writings on other subjects adhere to an orthodox position that bodily illness arises from sin and that the sick should resign themselves to their fate without complaint.
- 20.
In this respect I depart from Ed Cohen (2009) in his argument that ‘Through this hybrid process, medicine begins to supplant religion as an automatic basis for making political decisions about the public good’, in A Body Worth Defending (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press), p. 63.
- 21.
M. P. Donato (2014) Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Burlington, VT: Ashgate).
- 22.
(1721) A Letter to a Friend in the Country, Attempting a Solution of the Scruples and Objections of a Conscientious or Religious Nature, Commonly Made against the New Way of Receiving the Small-Pox (Boston: S. Gerrish), p. 3.
- 23.
(2009) Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 87.
- 24.
Although it should be noted that Douglass did eventually administer inoculation himself after overcoming his initial aversion to the practice.
- 25.
(1730) A Practical Essay Concerning The Small Pox (Boston: D. Henchman and T. Hancock).
- 26.
(2012) The Turkish Embassy Letters, T. Heffernan and D. O’Quinn (eds) (Peterborough: Broadview Press), p. 265.
- 27.
(2012) ‘Girodet and the Eternal Sleep’, in H. Deutsch and M. Terrall, Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 66.
- 28.
Coincidentally and tragically, William Spencer died two days after the death of his own father.
- 29.
(1994) ‘Medical Advance and Female Fame: Inoculation and its After-Effects’, Lumen, XIII, 13–42. See also R. Porter (1993) Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860 (London: MacMillan Press), p. 22.
- 30.
Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, 25 August 1722.
- 31.
(1722) ‘Some Remarks Upon Dr. Wagstaffe’s Letter, and Mr. Massey’s Sermon Against Inoculating the Small-Pox: With an Account of the Inoculation of Several Children; and Some Reasons for the Safety and Security of that Practice. In Three Letters to a Friend’ (London: J. Clark), p. 13. However, as Grundy argues, ‘it may be wrong to ascribe the servant’s death to inoculation, and it is almost certainly wrong so to ascribe the child’s. The servant apparently had a fever at the date of his inoculation, which is likely to have been the onset of natural smallpox caught from the already-inoculated Bathurst children. Nineteen days elapsed between William Spencer’s operation and his death; his pustules were mostly gone; the postmortem found other causes for his fits. Most tellingly of all, relatives on both sides of his family went straight on to inoculate other very young children.’ (p. 22)
- 32.
(2005) Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), p. 93.
- 33.
In his sustained diatribe against the practice, the surgeon Leghard Sparham (1722) complains of his colleagues who ‘barter health for disease’ in a sentence that syntactically links the practice to other modern speculative projects such as the South Sea Bubble: ‘We have seen South-Sea Schemes, good Parliaments, Bills for preventing the Plague; heard of Plots: but, till now, never dreamt that Mankind would industriously plot to their own Ruin, and barter Health for Diseases.’ Reasons Against Inoculating the Smallpox (London: J. Peele), p. 24.
- 34.
(1722) Inoculation of the Small Pox as Practised in Boston (Boston: J. Franklin), p. 20.
- 35.
Arbuthnot does not elaborate on his reasoning for disputing the causes of death in these three cases, although it is likely that he agreed with Maitland’s opinion that at least one of the patients contributed to her death by refusing to heed medical advice.
- 36.
S. Senn (2003) Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 37.
A. Rusnock (2002) Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 20.
- 38.
Wilson, ‘The Politics of Medical Improvement,’ p. 32.
- 39.
(1722) Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox (London: J. Downing), p. 27.
- 40.
It is possible that the reader is meant to infer that Jeffery exposed himself to natural smallpox during his jaunt to London prior to the inoculation. Moreover, having introduced the medical opinion that a person could battle natural and artificial smallpox simultaneously, Fuller draws on his experience of treating three patients under his care who had ‘two Crops of two Sorts’ of Variolae, both of which came about through natural infection in all cases.
- 41.
For a recent discussion of Lady Mary’s contributions to the smallpox debates, see A. McQuigge’s (2014) ‘“They Give no Cordials to Heighten the Fever”: Lady Mary, Corruption, and the Problem of Royal Influence’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 27:2, 181–200.
- 42.
J. Kirkpatrick (1754) The Analysis of Inoculation: Comprizing the History, Theory, and Practice of it: With an Occasional Consideration of the Most Remarkable Appearances in the Small Pox (London: J. Buckland), p. 3.
- 43.
According to the OED.
- 44.
See A. Guerrini (2003) Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).
- 45.
Massey’s retrospective diagnosis of Job as the first smallpox patient was roundly derided by his opponents.
- 46.
As David Morris (2001) writes, ‘the eighteenth century helped decisively to reconfigure the experience of death’, ‘A Poetry of Absence’, in J. Sitter (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 232.
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McGuire, K. (2016). Death by Inoculation: The Fashioning of Mortality in Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Pamphlets. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_10
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