The Princess Amelia, aged eleven, and Caroline, aged nine, were therefore inoculated on the 19th of April, 1722.
Let us return to Maitland, whose triumph for the moment appeared complete, and with it his assurance. To his detractors he professed boldly--
I could bring a great many cases of persons inoculated in Turkey to prove _the constant and certain success of the practice_; in all which I have never seen any miscarriage, except in one, which was wholly due to the rashness and inadvertence of a surgeon at Constantinople.
Is it not a matter of the greatest importance for us to know how to prevent the mighty contagion of the smallpox, and how to preserve our children from the violent attacks and fatal effects of it?
To divine Maitland’s character--to determine how far he was deceiver or deceived is not easy. He obviously made professions in vast excess of his knowledge. One of his contemporaries writes--
I remember Mr. Maitland at Child’s Coffee House, when the experiment was just begun at Newgate, was as confident and positive of the success and security proposed by inoculation as if he had had twenty years experience without any miscarriage, which made those who heard him justly suspect he was more concerned for the employ than for the success of it.[21]
He had not the proper craft of this conscious rogue, for alongside his assertions of absolute competence and safety, he set forth such confessions of ignorance and disaster, that one is impelled to pronounce him a purblind enthusiast. For example, take this case, which he published without apparently any sense of its scope--
_2nd October, 1721._--After due preparation of the body, I engrafted Mary Batt, an infant of two years and a half old, daughter of Thomas Batt, a Quaker, living at Temple, within three miles of Hertford. The red spots and flushings appeared on her face and neck the fourth day; and she kept playing about well till the seventh or eighth, when she became a little heavy and thirsty, with a fuller and quicker pulse; then the pustules came out fresh and full, and the incisions discharged a thick and well digested matter. She had not above twenty in all upon her; they continued about three or four days, then dried away and fell off, and the child recovered perfectly.