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Variolation
vs. Vaccination Early on, people feared that the sores of variolation would continue growing until they rotted limbs to the core. By the 14th to 16th day, however, the sores usually began to heal, though they left much larger scars than the nickel-sized dimpled marks of vaccination. Once, when Lady Mary's young son Edward Wortley ran away to join the Royal Navy, he got as far as Gibraltar before he was identified - by his inoculation scars - and returned home. |
| Chromolithograph
after a painting by George Kirtland (c. 1802) The Wellcome Library, London Variolation on left, Vaccination on right |
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The
Speckled Monster |
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A
smallpox patient in London
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Ingres's Turkish Bath In 1717, Lady Mary deemed the women's bath in Sofia a scene worthy of Titian's brush and wished that her friend, portraitist Charles Jervas, could have joined her. "It would have very much improved his art," she wrote, "to see so many fine women naked in different postures." But Titian was long dead, Jervas was far off in London, and in any case the place was off-limits to men. So she painted the scene herself, with words rather than a brush, admiring so much "skin shiningly white" - without the faintest trace of smallpox scarring. A century later, the young French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres took notes on what was the most erotic and no doubt most read of Lady Mary's Embassy Letters. When he was 82, he returned to the notes of his hot-blooded youth and finally delivered her scene in voluptuous paint. |
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Le
bain turc ["The Turkish Bath"] (1862) |
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Dr.
Boylston's First Book In
1726, at the urging of the Royal Society, Boylston published his case
notes from the 1721 epidemic as a book, titled An Historical Account
of the Small-Pox Inoculated in New England. |
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Painted c. 1725 in her Turkish robes, with an African page-boy. Society
portraitists regularly brushed roses-and-cream |
| Attributed
to Jonathan Richardson © Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library |
