Turkish Embassy Letters by Mary Wortley Montagu

The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which is the term they give it. I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. Much like the salon culture of France that existed concurrently, women in the Ottoman Empire congregated in the harems to both gossip and to develop their own medical tradition. While the deadly disease ravaged England, she was lucky enough to accompany her husband (with whom she eloped, much to her family’s chagrin) to the Ottoman Empire, where she was introduced to the concept of vaccines by a group of native Turkish women. Her biting wit and keen intellect won her favor with the court of King George I, but she was looked upon as a glamorized courtesan, as evidenced by the fact that she lost that favor once her face was marred by smallpox. The compilation of her travel writings, aptly titled the, “Turkish Embassy Letters,” was published posthumously should she have published it while alive, she likely would have needed to use a pseudonym. She railed against the patriarchy, while gleaning all she could from it. She was a vivacious and worldly woman in a period when women were expected to be nothing but demure, and is remembered for both her flamboyant personality & adventurous spirit. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.Lady Mary Montagu was an eighteenth century noblewoman whose contributions to the fields of travel writing and medicine were nearly forgotten due to her sex. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements.

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Turkish Embassy Letters by Mary Wortley Montagu