As a seven year old, Lady Mary had her name engraved on the drinking glasses of London’s Kit Kat Club, yet her father denied her a formal education. This episode follows how she taught herself Latin in the family library, eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu rather than accept the marriage her father arranged, and survived smallpox in 1715 with a scarred face after the disease had killed her brother. In 1716 her husband became British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and in Constantinople she watched older women perform engrafting, now called variolation, scratching material from a mild smallpox case into healthy skin.

She had the embassy surgeon inoculate her five year old son. Back in England, during the 1721 epidemic, she had her daughter inoculated and helped bring about a trial on condemned prisoners at Newgate, who were offered pardons, survived, and proved immune. She defended the practice in print under a pseudonym. Her Turkish embassy letters described women’s bathhouses from the inside, and her later life brought a feud with Alexander Pope and two decades living in Italy and France.

• Opposition from physicians to a remedy from the East that was administered by women
• Her comparison of the Ottoman bathhouses to English coffee houses
• Pope’s attacks on her intellect, morals, and smallpox scars after she reportedly laughed at his advances
• She left her letters with a clergyman in the Netherlands, and her daughter burned her diaries after her death
• A Yorkshire obelisk honoring her for bringing inoculation to England from Turkey