Notes suggested by the Franklin-Heberden pamphlet of 1759 / by Henry K. Cushing.

  • Cushing, Henry K. (Henry Kirke), 1827-1910
Date:
[1904]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes suggested by the Franklin-Heberden pamphlet of 1759 / by Henry K. Cushing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    [378] friend Mary Chiswell, from Adrianople, April 1, 1717, 0. S. She wrote: The Small pox so fatal and 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 when the heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small pox; they make parties for the purpose; and when they are met (commonly 15 or 16 to- gether) the old woman comes with a nut shell of the matter of the best small pox. Her little son Edward, three years old, was soon after inoc- ulated under the supervision of Mr. Maitland, surgeon to the British Ambassador, her husband, at the Ottoman Court. She inserted it so roughly and clumsily in the arm of the child that Mr. Maitland completed the operation in the other arm. The Montagues returned to England in October, 1718, but only in April, 1721, two and one-half years later, was the daughter, born in Turkey, (four months old when the brother was inoculated) inoculated in London, also by Mr. Maitland. This was the first recorded example in Europe, outside of European Turkey. The Princess Caroline, of Wales, having lost a daughter by small pox, and anxious to preserve her other children, though an intimate friend of Lady Mary's, was not fully at ease as to the safety of the operation. The King, at her solicitation, pardoned six criminals who were willing to undergo the ordeal on those terms.18 They were inoculated at Newgate by Mr. Maitland, August 9th, 1721, four months later than Lady Mary's daughter. In further trial two groups of Charity children, one of six and An old Greek woman, many years in the habit of engrafting, was employed to procure variolous matter from a suitable subject. 11 Always taken from a child. 15 Crookshank on Vaccination. 10 It succeeded happily upon five of them, the sixth, it was found, had already had small pox.