Lady Montagu Research Articles

Knowledge Ottoman Turkish Medicine : From Methods of Immunization Traditional to Pioneer World Vaccine

This research explores the history of immunization "vaccination" which was known as the variation method during the Ottoman Turkish period. The method used is the historical method, with the stages of source collection, source criticism, interpretation and writing. Data were collected from conventional and non-conventional libraries (internet), sources collected in the form of books, journal articles, website articles and others printed or from the internet that support this research. Furthermore, the facts obtained are narrated diachronically so that the facts described are chronological. The results of this study show that the development of vaccines that is happening now is a great contribution from Ottoman Turkey. The history of vaccination was started by the Ottoman Turkish government, Ottoman (Ottoman Turkish) physicians created and developed the variolation (inoculation) method, a traditional vaccine method by taming and using viruses (germs) applied to human skin that had previously been scratched. In this way, the virus injected into the human body (smallpox sufferers or non-smallpox sufferers) will experience illness and during the illness the immune process is formed so that the patient will get immunity (antibody). The success of vaccination from Ottoman Turkey has spread to Europe which saved many human lives and eradicated smallpox, especially England which was brought by Lady Mary Montagu, traders, sailors, ambassadors and others who learned the variolation method from Ottoman Turkey.

18세기 초 인두접종 지식과 기술 도입 다시보기

London and Boston were inarguably the two most important centers in the early history of smallpox inoculation in the West. Moving from simple to complex, this article reexamines the conventional story of the adoption of smallpox inoculation, diving more deeply into the knowledge of early experimenters and their practice of the technology. Before the introduction of smallpox inoculation in London by the famous Lady Mary Montagu and Dr. Charles Maitland and in Boston by Rev. Cotton Matter and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, knowledge of the practice had already circulated in the transatlantic world by word of mouth. Information about the methods and techniques of inoculation was inconsistent and complex, but early experimenters did not exclude such methods, which were later considered to be non-Western in style. Surgical tools and inoculation methods were transformed through practice, and imperfection in written knowledge and technical complexity at the practical level were ingrained from the very beginning of the history of smallpox inoculation.

Batılı Kadın Seyyahların Anlatımlarında Haremde Doğum Kutlamaları

Turkey has been the starting point of travels to the East in the 19th century, as in previous centuries. The improvement of travel conditions, the development of railways and steamships, the publication of guidebooks for travelers going to the East and the Ottoman Empire, revived the travel literature and allowed many travelogues to be written. It is known that a small number of women, such as Lady Montagu and Elizabeth Craven, who could travel with the opportunities of the upper class in the previous century, came to Ottoman lands with official relations. In the 19th century, it was seen that women from the middle-lower class traveled, and information about the Ottoman harem was obtained through the travel books they wrote. In this study, birth rituals, which are a part of the social life of women, will be included in the eyes of Western female travelers who were able to enter the harem. Most of the Western travelers observed the customs and traditions of Ottoman women such as engagement, marriage, birth, hosting guests. In the life of Ottoman women, we witness that after marriage, birth is traditionally celebrated with a ceremony such as weddings and holidays. Each of these traditions has its customs and procedures. It is a common custom, especially among wealthy Turkish women, to receive guests until midnight for seven days from the birth of the first son. This tradition is practiced in a much more ostentatious way among members of the dynasty. Having a child, which strengthens family ties in Turkish society, has enabled marriage to be seen as one of the means of legitimacy as a requirement of the religion of Islam. Since children are given special importance in Turkish society, married couples are often expected to have children. As an inevitable result of this expectation, the birth of the child was given importance in the society in general, and the births of the children were celebrated with demonstrations. In addition to Ottoman archives and records, this issue was mentioned in Surnames and manuscripts with miniatures, and it found its place in the narratives of female travelers in travel books that constitute the majority of our research. Thus, the fact that female travelers who came to the capital of the empire included birth celebrations in the harem contributed to the promotion of this tradition. Keywords: Travelogue, Harem, Birth rituels.

A Witness from the 18th Century: The Culture and Art Environment of Ottoman Cities in the Letters of Lady Montagu

This article aims to analyze the architectural and artistic environment in the Ottoman cities based on the letters of Lady Mary Montagu, who came to the Ottoman capital for her husband’s diplomatic mission in the early eighteenth century. For this purpose, information on the state’s political relations and social structure in the years when Lady Montagu was in the Ottoman lands were presented (1717-1718). Lady Mary Montagu’s letters were written differently than the pilgrims who had come to the Ottoman lands in previous years. It is seen that different kinds of subjects such as Ottoman society, women, clothing and apparel, harem, religious rituals, daily life, smallpox vaccine and architectural texture of cities were included in the letters. Thus, letters have been the subject of various studies. Lady Montagu devoted some of her letters to the architectural structures and interior decorations she observed in Istanbul and Edirne. The depictions of flowers and fruit for interior decorations of lodging and houses are some of the characteristic decorations of civil architectural works of the time. In addition, Lady Montagu’s depictions from the beginning of the eighteenth century also provide information about some of the architectural works that have not survived to the present day. Martyr Ali Pasha Mansion is one of the works seen by Lady Montagu herself but not present today.

ART ET ARTIFICES DE LA PRÉFACE VIATIQUE : VOYAGEURS EN ORIENT

This study aims to investigate the many forms of the preface in relation to the conditions of its production and the profile of the preface writer in certain travel accounts in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, or Turkey from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It is interesting to see the diversity of the construction of the self in the prolegomenes, intended to enhance the good reception of the narrative. From the simple traveller in search of exoticism to the passionate missionary, the prefaces of travel relationships offer an array of discursive strategies where the narrator's ethos underpins a rhetoric specific to the travel literature. Lady Montagu, Bugéja, Eberhardt, Montesquieu, Loti and other travellers invite the reader not only to explore a travel experience, but also to grasp the secrets of a rhetorical approach consciously undertaken.

ANNE FINCH AND LADY MARY MONTAGU AS “THIEVES OF LANGUAGE"

This paper explores the strategies of two eighteenth-century female poets to write and publish their poetry in an era when literature was dominated by male authors. In the eighteenth century, language and literature were considered male-dominated areas. For this reason, women had to face many obstacles to express themselves in literature and to be accepted as authors/poets. However, due to the critical shift from patronage to printing as a profit-making market, women’s writing displayed itself from almost non-existence. Still, the female authors/poets of the century such as Anne Finch and Lady Mary Montagu needed to fabricate various strategies to write, publish, and own the authorship of their own works. Thanks to those strategies, they were able to produce poems in the very language which was often associated with male authors and oppressed them. Hence, Anne Finch and Lady Mary Montagu can be defined as “thieves of language.” In this context, this paper analyzes Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” and Lady Mary Montagu’s “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace” in the context of Neoclassical poetry by investigating how these two women poets generate different strategies to insert their own voice into the masculine literary tradition in the Augustan age. Finch’s “The Introduction” deals with her concerns on publishing her poems in the tradition that marginalizes and scorns women poets while Lady Montagu’s “Verses” strategically and severely attacks Alexander Pope, the leading figure of Neoclassical literature, by writing back in the same style as Pope.

Katrina O’Loughlin. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century.

Katrina O’Loughlin. <i>Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Oryantalist Metinlerde Özne Olarak Batılı Kadın: Lady Montagu’nun Türkiye Mektupları Örneği

Batı'nın Doğu hakkındaki imajları ya da söylemlerini içeren Oryantalizm seyahat metinleri, edebiyat eserleri, bilimsel çalışmalar gibi birçok alanda örneklerini görebileceğimiz bir alandır. Oryantalist metinlerde en çok kullanılan imajlardan biri kadın ve onun yer aldığı harem, hamam, köle pazarı gibi mekanlardır. Çoğunlukla Avrupalı erkekler tarafından üretilen Oryantalist metinlerde kadın ve onun içinde bulunduğu mekanlar Batılı erkeklerin arzularına cevap verecek şekilde sembolleştirilir ve ortaya Batılı erkek-öznenin gözünden çizilen bir Doğu anlatısı koleksiyonu çıkar. Batılı kadın seyyahlar da daha sonra Doğu'ya seyahat ederek Batılı-erkek bakışın metinlerinden ayrışan ve kadın-bakışını yansıtan eserler ortaya koyarlar. Bu çalışmada Bu çalışmada, 1717-1718 yılında İstanbul'da bulunan Lady Worthley Montagu'ya ait Türkiye Mektupları kitabı ele alınıp incelenecek ve Batılı kadın ve erkek öznelerin Doğulu kadına bakışındaki benzerlikler ve farklılıklar gösterilecektir.

Orientalist Perspective in the Letters of Lady Mary Montagu and Kelemen Mikes

An English aristocrat, poet and writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was a privileged and distinguished woman traveller in her time. During her sojourn in Ottoman Istanbul, she noted down significant details as regards the Constantinople and seraglio through her vivid descriptions as a liberated woman in her Embassy Letters. Another significant oriental work, Letters from Turkey by Kelemen Mikes (1690-1761), who was a Transylvanian-born Hungarian writer and political figure, is centered upon Mikes’s life in exile between the years 1717 and 1758 within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. In Letters from Turkey, we can feel his strong sense of Hungarian identity and his steadiness in maintaining his cultural and religious customs and values in his elaboration of his own and the “other” culture, while his praising the benign and merciful ruling style of Ottoman Sultans offers a different view of orientalism in favour of the “other” culture (Ottoman Empire). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the Letters of Lady Mary Montagu and Kelemen Mikes from their political, ethnical, religious and personal perspectives and trace several relationships that has allusive discussion relativity in the discourse of Orientalism. After having explained the specific letters of both writers, I will attempt to use the scope of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Enlightenment Orientalism discussed in Sirinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, as a magnifying glass to different oriental images and conceptions contradictory with the reality in the eighteenth century. This study will mostly make use of Edward Said’s account of orientalism as well as Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of Self Fashioning in order to explicate the differences as to how the Orient is perceived by the authors from different cultures but from the same period. In order to highlight how the definition of Orient changes, this paper attempts to define the Orient in accordance with the works of Lady Montagu and Kelemen Mikes.

Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer by John Van Wyhe

Reviewed by: Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer by John Van Wyhe Lai Suat Yan Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer by JOHN VAN WYHE. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press: 2019. 344 pp. ISBN: 978-981-3250-76-5 This well-researched book on the amazing feat of the Austrian Ida Pfeiffer, documents her five adventurous journeys around the world starting with her first voyage to the Holy Land that traverses historical sites such as Smyrna, Beirut, Caesarea, and Jerusalem, the holy city central to various events in biblical history. The journey that started in late March 1842 took around six months. Her second journey to Iceland was to satisfy her romantic sensibility of visiting a remote place with immense natural wonders boasting a geography that included tundra, lakes, glaciers, geysers to volcanoes. During the six-month journey from April to October 1845, she visited Copenhagen, Hafnarfjörðour (Harbour Fjord), Reykjavík, Krýsuvík, a geothermal area, Gullfoss (Golden Falls), Mount Hekla, a volcano, Stockholm and Christiania (now Oslo). In 1846–1848, she circled the globe in 900 days as an expression of her wanderlust in her third voyage from Vienna to Prague, Brazil, Chile, Tahiti, Macao, Hong Kong, Canton, Singapore, Colombo and Kandy in Sri Lanka, Calcutta, Benares, Agra, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bombay in India, Assyria, Baghdad, Mosul, Urmia (Iran today), Nakhchivan and Yerevan in Armenia, Tbilisi and Redut Kale (present-day Kulevi) in Georgia, Odessa in Russia, Constantinople, Athens and Trieste before arriving home again in Vienna. Her fourth voyage from 1851–1855, included these localities: Prague, Hamburg, London, Cape Town, Singapore, Kuching and Sirambau in Sarawak before venturing into the heart of Borneo—Sintang, Landak, Pontianak, and Sambas. In this leg of the journey she also explored Java, Sumatra, the Maluku Islands, Sulawesi, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, California, New Orleans, Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Montreal, and Portugal. Her last journey was to Madagascar (1856–1858), presumably, because of the potential wealth of natural history specimens that may be handy to fund her next voyage. She caught the 'Madagascar fever' [End Page 220] during this trip, however, and died aged 61 at her brother's residence in Vienna on 27 October 1858. Her travels were also contextualized with the feats of the famous male travellers in history, namely Marco Polo, Captain Cook and Ibn Battuta, all of whom she surpassed in terms of the distance covered. Compared with female travellers preceding or during her time, for example, Maria Merian, Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Mary Montagu and the Prussian Countess Ida Hahn-hahn, she stood out for venturing by herself on a limited budget. She typically travelled second or third class on steamers. Sailing on a crowded brig from Beirut to Alexandria for eleven nights she had no privacy. Others slept or used her mat whenever she left it momentarily and even used her toothbrush without asking. Travelling from Cairo on camel for the first time across the desert and unable to afford the rest houses, she slept outside their grounds. She survived numerous adventures on her trip including turbulent seas, robbery, threats that she would be killed and devoured and near drowning in a remarkably calm manner. Her experiences of living through poverty for nearly ten years after her husband lost his wealth, and her own wanderlust, stood her in good stead during these formidable encounters. She also learnt the skills needed to collect and preserve natural history specimens which she would sell to museums in order to fund her trips. Her adventurous spirit knew no bounds. She ventured to Telemark, Norway, though it was difficult for a woman to travel alone among the peasantry particularly with almost rudimentary command of the language. Places to which no Europeans had ventured or where the local men were killed, for example in Sumatra, seemed instead to spur her on rather than deter her spirits. Her wanderlust was ignited by the man she loved who had spurned her. It became an escape route that enabled her to follow her heart, particularly after the constraining life growing up under the dictates of her mother. These observations allowed us glimpses of the circumstances that drove her to embark on these remarkable journeys. Nevertheless...

Turkish baths and their functions as represented in the memoirs of Westerners

When the social lives and leisure activities of Turkish women are observed, Western travel writers generally share examples of the amusements that occurred in Turkish baths. There is a chapter about amusements in most of the memoirs written by travel writers who came to the Turkish territory during the time of the Ottoman Empire. In this chapter, there is a lot of information about Turkish baths including the lifestyles of Turkish women. The Turkish bath should not be considered a place where people –men and women- just go and take baths. It is a place where Turkish women spend most of their time with their friends and neighbours. Women also use baths as meeting places similar to cafes and restaurants. Thus, foreign writers convey the importance of baths for Turkish women in their works, and sometimes with exaggerated examples. Within this context travel writers such as Lady Montagu, Vahan Cardashian, Lucy M. J. Garnett, and Miss Pardoe either wrote a chapter on baths or shared information about these places in their writings. This study will, therefore, focus on the significance of Turkish baths in Turkish culture based on the works of Western writers and reveal how Turkish women amuse themselves in these places.

Plagues: Perceptions of Risk and Social Responses

Plagues:Perceptions of Risk and Social Responses William H. Foege (bio) polybius taught us, over 2000 years ago, that the world is an organic whole,1 where everything affects everything. Plagues demonstrate that truth—crossing cultures, crossing time, but also joining cultures and time inextricably, influencing the births and deaths of people, careers, and nations. Indeed, in a recently overworked phrase, "plagues bend history." Perhaps rivaling the Black Death, which has received so much attention, was the pandemic of cholera which broke the boundaries of India in the early nineteenth century, moved across Russia by 1830, caused havoc at Mecca in 1831, moved across Europe in 1831 and 1832, arrived in the United States and went by canal boat to Albany and then to the Missouri River by 1833, where it became the determining factor for many wagon trains over the next years. In 1835, Marcus Whitman, the first medical missionary to the American west, made his initial journey to Oregon and was credited with saving a wagon train by stopping a cholera outbreak.2 That epidemic allowed him to earn his reputation and start a career. Twelve years later, another epidemic, this one of measles, led to the Whitman Mission massacre, ending his career and the lives of the mission personnel.3 The Whitman Mission story becomes a paradigm for what has happened across cultures and nations. In the early eighteenth century, British troops began to receive variolation with smallpox virus, after Lady Montagu introduced the practice she had observed in Turkey, [End Page 305] where her husband was ambassador.4 Fifty years later, the battle of Quebec, where American troops outnumbered the British two to one, was lost by American troops when smallpox swept through their ranks but spared the British troops who had been variolated. (Some Canadians to this day worship smallpox as the deliverer from United States citizenship.) In 1801, Thomas Jefferson acquired smallpox vaccine and personally administered it to his family and neighbors at Monticello. In 1804, he gave vaccine to Lewis and Clark, instructing them to administer it to Indians because of their high mortality rates due to smallpox. But it was too little and smallpox opened the west, decimating tribes and breaking their spirit. DeVoto writes about the 1837 outbreak, "All summer long not a single Indian came to Fort McKenzie. … Early in the fall Culbertson set out to … find out what was wrong. … Then at the Three Forks he found a village. No sound came from it as he approached, there were no horses or dogs, no children, no uproar. Presently they smelled the stench and then 'hundreds of decaying forms of human beings … lay scattered everywhere among the lodges.'"5 On July 14 a young Mandan died of smallpox. Six months later only a hundred of the 1600 Mandans were still alive and no tribal organization could be maintained. There are no full-blooded Mandans today. What lessons have we learned from this continuous flow of plague history? Are we truly better off because of what has happened upstream, or do the problems continue to change so dramatically that the lessons are only marginally beneficial? In this first session, we can only touch on some of the lessons of plague history. My attempts will be modest—to say something about: (a). the definition of plagues (b). the perception of risk (c). responses [End Page 306] DEFINITION The definition of plague offered by the 1986 Webster Medical Desk Dictionary, describing plague as an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality, is inadequate for several reasons. Epidemiologists now commonly use the term epidemic to describe an unusual occurrence of a disease or condition. Thus, while a single case of smallpox would constitute an epidemic, the million cases of gonorrhea each year in the United States would be considered an endemic disease but not necessarily an epidemic. Therefore, two problems with Webster's definition of the term are particularly significant. First, plagues do not have to be epidemic: a plague can be endemic, a constant presence. Second, mortality rates should not be the criterion for measurement. In describing one plague, the Old Testament notes the presence of fiery serpents, now known to be...

Srinivas Aravamudan

Srinivas Aravamudan Jonathan Culler Although I am not in any way an eighteenth-century scholar, I was the chair of Srinivas Aravamudan’s dissertation committee at Cornell. I don’t recall exactly how this happened—whether he enlisted me at the beginning of his graduate school career, before his eventual specialization in the eighteenth century became clear, or whether he persuaded me that, despite my lack of knowledge of the eighteenth century and especially of the texts and discourses of colonialism, the rhetorical focus of his project made it appropriate for me to be his thesis director. (Srinivas was always very persuasive, as many colleagues and institutions, including the Mellon Foundation, can attest.) I suspect it may have been the latter, since Srinivas came to Cornell after having completed an MA at Purdue in 1986, and so was not starting from scratch. In any event, I agreed because I understood that it would be a pleasure to work with such a talented and engaging student, whatever the eventual topic of the dissertation. Srinivas completed his dissertation, “Tropical Figures: Colonial Representation in England and France, 1688–1789,” in 1991, after spending a year in Paris, studying with Jacques Derrida, among others. (In the biographical sketch that prefaces the thesis, he wrote that “he decided both to conduct research and live life to the fullest in Paris, France. When he found that Paris was perhaps conducive to [End Page 104] life, but much less so to research, he returned to labor in the intellectual vineyards at Ithaca.”) As the title indicates, his dissertation formed the basis of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, an immensely successful book which won the MLA’s first book prize and is still highly regarded in eighteenth-century studies. The success of Tropicopolitans is testimony to the advantages of giving junior faculty time to develop the dissertation into something truly valuable and memorable, rather than pushing them to publish a book that will be out by the time of a tenure revue at the beginning of the sixth year, as administrators increasingly seem to demand. Srinivas’s dissertation was completed in 1991 and Tropicopolitans was published eight years later. He took the time to produce a real transformation. What is striking when one compares the two volumes is that, while the three main texts discussed in the dissertation—Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Captain Singleton, and the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes—remain central to the book (others were added, especially Equiano’s autobiography, Lady Mary Montagu’s Letters from the Levant, and several discussions of the sublime), the conceptual framework was radically modified. The starting point for the dissertation is the work of Antonio Gramsci and his account of subalternity, neither of which even figures in the index of Tropicopolitans. And the conclusion of the dissertation, essentially an essay on tropes, starts from Hayden White’s organization of the historical field through the four fundamental tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Strikingly, White too disappears from Tropicopolitans. The fundamental argument of the dissertation, “that literary representations of colonized peoples—such as Caribbean slaves—had a profound impact on the formation of the Enlightenment-inspired Western political subject, because discourses of individualism, economic freedom, secularism, and national liberation were intricately linked with colonial modes of domination and the representation of those modes,” is recognizable in Tropicopolitans.1 But the focus in the dissertation is on “examining the interaction between various modes of ‘subalternity’ and the strategies of ideological containment that were deployed to combat the resistances that subalterns posed” (3). Relying on Gramsci’s six-point definition of the steps to be followed in studying subalternity, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s influential discussions of hegemony and on the Subaltern Studies investigations of peasant resistance in India, the dissertation adopts a political vocabulary quite different from that of Tropicopolitans, asserting that “historically-oriented literary criticism could learn a great deal from subaltern historiography’s reconstruction of elisions within dominant historiography” (10–11). This introduction makes little reference to the current state of eighteenth-century studies but sees itself rather as allied with feminist, cultural-materialist and anti-imperialist critics generally in “a...

Killing the Speckled Monster: Riots, Resistance, and Reward in the Story of Smallpox Vaccination

138 Health & History, 2016. 18/2 Museums and Media Killing the Speckled Monster: Riots, Resistance, and Reward in the Story of Smallpox Vaccination Vaccination: Medicine and the Masses. An exhibition at the Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, 35–43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PE, UK On display 19 April to 17 September 2016. https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums/hunterian/exhibitions Viewed on 14 June 2016. En route to the vaccination exhibition, it was easy to get distracted by the impressive variety of preserved specimens on display in one of London’s most fascinating museums, the Hunterian. Jar upon jar of human and animal body parts as well as medical tools, skeletons, and other paraphernalia are enough to keep a visitor absorbed for hours. Happily, the Qvist gallery exhibition of Vaccination: Medicine and the Masses was equally captivating. The focus of this exhibit was the relationship between the medical profession and the public on the topic of vaccination. A striking object on display is a draft manuscript of the report written in 1798 by Dr Edward Jenner, the father of vaccination, that was to influence the global approach to combating infectious diseases.1 Jenner experimentally inoculated a young boy called Edward Phipps with cowpox virus in an attempt to show that this so-called ‘vaccination’ with the mild disease, cowpox, could protect Phipps against the deadly smallpox virus. Jenner’s report of his success was recognised by the medical fraternity for its potential in delivering the masses from the scourge of smallpox; however, community concerns relating to safety of the procedure were rife. This is exemplified in the exhibition by George Cruikshank’s ‘The Cowpox Tragedy’, a cartoon depicting people growing horns after being vaccinated with cowpox. Moreover, the introduction of vaccination was accompanied by resistance and scepticism about state-organised mass vaccination programs. The exhibition included gruesome images of children and adults affected by smallpox, the ‘speckled monster’, demonstrating the devastating and permanent scarring of those ‘fortunate’ to survive Health & History ● 18/2 ● 2016 139 Image 1: The Cowpox Tragedy by George Cruikshank (1812), Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons. Image courtesy of Hunterian Museum. 140 EXHIBITION REVIEWS the infection. These images were accompanied by some interesting commentary on the broader social implications of smallpox such as women finding it more difficult to find a partner if they had survived the disease but were physically scarred.2 Jenner’s thesis on the protection afforded by vaccination was a turningpointinglobalpublichealthhistory,butthisexhibitionreminds us that it wasn’t a new idea. Hunterian visitors are introduced to Lady Mary Montagu, wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey. In the early 1700s she observed the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as ‘variolation’, and encouraged the practice on her return to England in about 1720.3 Whereas Jenner’s vaccination involved the use of the cowpox virus, which is immunologically similar to smallpox but less dangerous, variolation involved inoculation with a small dose of smallpox virus, usually taken from the lesion or pustule of a mild case of the disease. This practice had been employed for hundreds of years in Europe and Asia, reportedly even as early as the tenth century in China, and certainly there by the mid-1550s.4 Lady Montagu was a staunch proponent of variolation and her influence resulted in members of the Royal Family being Image 2: Wax models showing the development of pustules following vaccination for smallpox. These are on loan from the Gordon Museum of Pathology, King’s College London. Image courtesy of Hunterian Museum. Health & History ● 18/2 ● 2016 141 ‘variolated’ when she returned to England.5 Tools for vaccination are always interesting and the exhibit had some good examples. While most people have experienced vaccination using a sterile needle, this was certainly not the practice in the 1800s. It was common for practitioners to use one of the various vaccination tools to first break the skin by scraping, scratching, puncturing or lancing. Some of the cowpox vaccine material was then applied to the broken skin.6 Vaccine was obtained from lesions on a calf infected with cowpox or from a pustule from someone vaccinated in the weeks...

Oriental Disguise and the Thousand and One Nights in Nerval

Oriental Disguise and the Thousand and One Nights in Nerval Dominique Jullien Il me semble que j'ai vécu en Orient; et lorsque pendant le carnaval je me déguise en quelque caftan et quelque tarbouch authentique, je crois reprendre mes vrais habits. J'ai toujours été surpris de ne pas entendre l'Arabe couramment; il faut que je l'aie oublié.1 "Me voici en pleines Mille et une nuits!" exclaimed Gérard de Nerval, as he wandered around Cairo impersonating Caliph Harun Al-Rashid incognito in the streets of Bagdad. The legendary caliph of 9th-century Bagdad is the hero of a number of stories in the Arabian Nights, in which he sets out, disguised as an ordinary merchant, in search of adventures in the streets of his city. For 19th-century artists on their Grand Oriental tour, the Nights— extraordinarily popular and familiar to most Europeans, not just as children's stories, but also through numerous stage adaptations— often served as a tourist guide, filtering their perceptions of the foreign reality, both an interpretative lens that colored travel experiences and a literary model that shaped travelogues. Arthur de Gobineau, in the introduction to his Nouvelles asiatiques, hailed the tales as the most accurate portrayal of the Orient: "C'est la vérité même" (III, 305). Travelers anticipated scenes and characters from the Nights and acted out the tales themselves. This included adopting the local costume, as Nerval, together with numerous other European visitors, would do in the course of his Oriental journey. These two paradigms— referring the oriental reality to the Nights and dressing as a local— coalesce into a recurring pattern, almost a cliché of 19th-century Oriental travelogues. Nerval enthusiastically adopted these practices common to the Orientalism of his generation. However, as this study argues, while all the elements found in other Oriental travelogues are also present in [End Page 31] Nerval's Voyage en Orient, there they compose a less controlled, more disturbing picture, one that goes to the heart of Nerval's identity crisis. By adopting the local costume, and by overlaying the tales over the 19th-century Oriental reality, Nerval was apparently conforming to what so many other Europeans before and after him would do. But, as we shall see, Nerval's use of these topoi was more complex than it would seem at first; for him it would lead to a more problematic engagement with the cultural Other and even more so with the other within himself. Oriental transvestism Donning the local costume, as Nerval did in Cairo, was hardly original. Oriental transvestism prevails from the earliest accounts of Western travelers to the East. We have portraits of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Lady Mary Montagu (who described her Turkish attire in loving detail in her letters) in Oriental costume. Later, in Pierre Loti's Aziyadé, the protagonist dons local dress and settles in the Muslim quarter of Constantinople. Of course, transvestism initially served a simple pragmatic purpose: J. J. Rifaud's Tableau de l'Egypte, one of the first guidebooks, published in 1830, recommended adopting the local costume as a safety measure.2 Beyond being a precautionary measure, however, transvestism typically signaled the Western traveler's openness to the Oriental culture, a feeling that sometimes went far deeper than the dress (conversely, Chateaubriand's insistence on dressing as a Frenchman during his Oriental journey goes hand in hand with his rejection of Turkish culture).3 Indeed, in some cases travelers also embraced the lifestyle, customs, even the beliefs of their adopted country. Lady Hester Stanhope, mentioned by Nerval for her conversion to Druze beliefs (II, 522), was admiringly described by Lamartine in her "beau costume oriental" complete with turban, cashmere shawl, immense turkish robe and yellow boots.4 Isabelle Eberhardt, an ardent convert to Islam, dressed, not only as an Arab, but also as a man (calling herself Mahmoud Saadi), a gender-crossing disguise with obvious practical value (allowing her freedom of movement and protection from men during her adventurous travels) but which also manifested her Oriental persona, the itinerant scholar of Islam that she became in Algeria.5 Edward Lane, in his less flamboyant manner, spent years in...

Lady Montagu versus Raymann – the first variolations in Europe

Lady Montagu versus Raymann – the first variolations in Europe

Estambul otomano de Juan Goytisolo: lo propio y lo ajeno

The journeys to the East have generated a rich imagery in Western culture. Juan Goytisolo’s Ottoman Istanbul addresses this issue introducing the city and its past to the contemporary European visitor. He reviews the cliches collected by travelers and shows us how the city has been used in many cases as a scapegoat for personal fears. This paper aims to detect and analyze the intertextual strategies used by Goytisolo to enrich typical views of the city and to connect the Ottoman world to the contemporary one. The author looks for testimonies that provide us with different points of view, such as the letters of Lady Montagu or quotations from A Trip to Turkey. On the other hand, he compares the Oriental and Western worlds. Traveling to Istanbul thus becomes a way to approach this exotic universe, but also a self revealing experience.

COSMETIC TRAGEDIES: FAILED MASQUERADE IN WILKIE COLLINS'STHE LAW AND THE LADY

Inasmuch as they offer advice on howto improve appearances, nineteenth-century beauty manuals also vividly describe the dangers of putting on a face. The consequences of using cosmetics – often comprised of toxic ingredients such as arsenic, mercury, and lead – might range from the discomfort of surface irritation to the fatality of poisoning. Several manuals recount the unfortunate story of Lady Mary Montagu, who suffered an allergic reaction to a popular cosmetic, the Genuine Balm of Mecca, which led her face to turn red and swell “to a very extraordinary size . . . . It remained in this tormentable state three days, during which you may be sure I passed my time very ill” (Toilette of Health64). Another woman succumbed to an equally unfortunate fate as the facial powder, or “pearl white,” she wore to a scientific demonstration suddenly turned black in an adverse reaction to the chemicals used in the experiment. In an even more tragic case, “Mrs. S, being much troubled with pimples, applied an alum poultice to her face, which was soon followed by a stroke of the palsy, and terminated in her death” (Clark iv, 46). These stories caution that beautification through artificial means may eradicate the very self that had sought improvement.

Love and Marriage in 18th-Century Britain

Love and Marriage in 18th-Century Britain Wendy Moore (bio) William Hogarth graphically depicted the pitfalls of arranged marriage in his cautionary cartoon series Marriage à-la-mode, published in 1745. Samuel Johnson famously described second marriages as the "triumph of hope over experience." The Georgians' fixation with wedlock was no accident. The secret of a successful marriage was one of the most hotly debated topics in the salons and coffee-houses of 18th-century England, and the outcome of this febrile discourse set the tone for our modern-day Western approach to marriage based on the ideal of a harmonious, companionable partnership founded in mutual love.1 The shift in ideas about marriage was profound. At the beginning of the 18th century most marriages among landed or moneyed families were essentially financial arrangements designed to cement powerful alliances and exchange or acquire land and property. Although people in working-class and agricultural communities were more or less free to choose their own partners for life—albeit generally within the same narrow economic group and geographical area—the vast majority of marriages among aristocratic, wealthy, and middle-class families were arranged by parents with the prospective bride and bridegroom having little or no say. Children were often betrothed in infancy and married in their teens, frequently to partners they barely knew and sometimes with disastrous consequences. Lord Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter, published in 1688, made the prospects plain when he explained: "It is one of the Disadvantages belonging to your Sex, that young Women are seldom permitted to make their own Choice."2 But if Lord Halifax—and presumably his daughter—was prepared to accept such an arrangement, others were not. In a scathing indictment of marriage published in 1700, the writer Mary Astell demanded to know: "If Marriage be such a blessed State, how comes it, may you say, that there are so few happy marriages?"3 She remained a spinster. When the 23-year-old Lady Mary Pierrepont was betrothed by her father in 1712 to an Irish aristocrat she had never met, she described her wedding arrangements as "daily preparations for my journey to Hell."4 Rather than descend into eternal torment, she eloped and married her lover, Edward Wortley Montagu, just days before the planned ceremony. Click for larger view View full resolution From William Hogarth's Marriage à-la-mode, "The Toilette Scene," 1745. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-112875]. As a growing number of thwarted young lovers voted with their feet, so criticism of arranged marriages increased during the first half of the 18th century. Hogarth's popular series of six scenes, which depict the tragic outcome of a marriage contracted by money-grasping parents and silver-tongued lawyers between a debauched young earl and the daughter of a rich merchant, reflected the mood. The writer Hester Chapone characterized such matches as "Smithfield bargains," in reference to the famed London meat market, and exclaimed, "so much ready money for so much land, and my daughter flung in into the bargain!"5 At the same time, the emphasis on self-expression, free will, and personal feelings in early 18th-century novels such as Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) was blamed for undermining the concept of arranged marriages and fueling expectations of romantic love.6 Whether the rising popularity of novels really influenced views on marriage or simply reflected changing opinion can probably never be determined. But certainly the former was the perception among disapproving older generations. François Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambray, in his Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, translated into English in 1713, warned of the dangers of girls reading "romances" and then being "astonished, not to find in the World real Persons, who may answer to these Romantick Heroes."7 Pressure from disgruntled parents, cheated out of advantageous matches by runaway couples, eventually led to the 1753 Marriage Act. Regulating marriage by the state for the first time in England with a series of rules standardizing weddings, the act stipulated that parental consent was required for couples wishing to marry under the age of 21. Undeterred, many...

THE PORTRAYAL OF THE EAST VS. THE WEST IN LADY MARY MONTAGU'S LETTERS AND EMILY RUETE'S MEMOIRS

AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), a great deal of controversy emerged that basically dealt with the West's elitist outlook and misrepresentation of the East. Very few studies concentrated on the other trend that embodied positive ideas. Some Western writers actually glorified the East and even considered it superior to the West. Geoffery Nash's study, From Empire to Orient : Travellers to the Middle East 1830-1926 (2005) falls into such a category. The author argues that the picture is more complex than the one previously proposed by Said who has mainly based his arguments on the Western 'hostile corpus.'1 Nash points to the Spirit of the East (1838), [written by the First Secretary at the British Embassy in Istanbul, David Urquhart (1805-1877)] as a pioneering work in this trend. Thus, for Nash, Urquhart stands as a 'discursive instability within Orientalism. There was also a woman who lived before Urquhart who could be considered, the pioneer in her views toward the East; namely Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762). Many critics of Montagu focused on Montagu's presumed lesbianism or licentious description of the seraglio. However, Montagu made various insightful and important comparisons between the West and the East, whether in the manners of people and habits, or in issues like slavery and women's rights. I would also like to point out some commonalities between Montagu's views and Emily Ruete's (1844-1924) Memoirs (1880s), which is the first known autobiography of an Arab woman. Ruete or Sayyda Salme, being an Arab Muslim princess living in Zanzibar, was the daughter of Sultan Said bin Sultan Al-Busaid of Oman (1791-1856). She stated her observations of Zanzibar and Oman between 1850 and 1865. The Arab princess, who later converted to Christianity to marry a German merchant, lived the rest of her life in Germany, criticized both the German and British societies.