Lady Mary understood her countrymen thoroughly, and, thirty years after her exploits in inoculation, she wrote to Mr. Wortley Montagu as follows--
I find Tar Water succeeded to Ward’s Drop. ’Tis possible, by this time, that some other quackery has taken place of that. The English are easier than any other nation infatuated by the prospect of universal medicines, nor is there any country in the world where the doctors raise such immense fortunes. I attribute it to the fund of credulity which is in all mankind. We have no longer faith in miracles and relics, and therefore with the same fury run after recipes and physicians. The same money which three hundred years ago was given for the health of the soul is now given for the health of the body, and by the same sort of people--women and half-witted men.[26]
Those who fancy there could be any wide or effective resistance to inoculation in 1721 misapprehend the conditions of the time. There was no scientific knowledge of the laws of health; diseases were generally regarded as mysterious dispensations of Providence over which the sufferers had little control; and a great part of medicine was a combination of absurdity with nastiness. It would not be difficult to compile a series of recipes from the pharmacopœia of that day which would alternately excite amusement, surprise, and disgust, and to describe medical practice from which it is marvellous that ever patient escaped alive; but so much must pass without saying. Suffice it to assert, that to inoculation there was little material for opposition, rational or irrational; and that what we might think the natural horror of transfusing the filth of smallpox into the blood of health, was neutralised by the currency of a multitude of popular remedies which seemed to owe their fascination to their outrageous and loathsome characteristics.
Moreover, as the dates prove, the interval was brief between the introduction of inoculation and its authoritative acceptance. The girl Montagu was privately inoculated in April, 1721, Dr. Keith’s boy on the 11th of May, the Newgate experiment took place on the 9th of August, a variety of experiments followed, and lastly the Princesses Amelia and Caroline were inoculated on the 19th of April, 1722--sharp work for one year. There was not time for opposition. The citadel of social approval was carried with a rush. As a contemporary observed--
