Letters on England [18]
expose them to die one time or other of the small-pox. But that the
reader may be able to judge whether the English or those who differ
from them in opinion are in the right, here follows the history of
the famed inoculation, which is mentioned with so much dread in
France.
The Circassian women have, from time immemorial, communicated the
small-pox to their children when not above six months old by making
an incision in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule,
taken carefully from the body of another child. This pustule
produces the same effect in the arm it is laid in as yeast in a
piece of dough; it ferments, and diffuses through the whole mass of
blood the qualities with which it is impregnated. The pustules of
the child in whom the artificial small-pox has been thus inoculated
are employed to communicate the same distemper to others. There is
an almost perpetual circulation of it in Circassia; and when
unhappily the small-pox has quite left the country, the inhabitants
of it are in as great trouble and perplexity as other nations when
their harvest has fallen short.
The circumstance that introduced a custom in Circassia, which
appears so singular to others, is nevertheless a cause common to all
nations, I mean maternal tenderness and interest.
The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and
indeed, it is in them they chiefly trade. They furnish with
beauties the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy,
and of all those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain
such precious merchandise. These maidens are very honourably and
virtuously instructed to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of
a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most
voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for
whom they are designed. These unhappy creatures repeat their lesson
to their mothers, in the same manner as little girls among us repeat
their catechism without understanding one word they say.
Now it often happened that, after a father and mother had taken the
utmost care of the education of their children, they were frustrated
of all their hopes in an instant. The small-pox getting into the
family, one daughter died of it, another lost an eye, a third had a
great nose at her recovery, and the unhappy parents were completely
ruined. Even, frequently, when the small-pox became epidemical,
trade was suspended for several years, which thinned very
considerably the seraglios of Persia and Turkey.
A trading nation is always watchful over its own interests, and
grasps at every discovery that may be of advantage to its commerce.
The Circassians observed that scarce one person in a thousand was
ever attacked by a small-pox of a violent kind. That some, indeed,
had this distemper very favourably three or four times, but never
twice so as to prove fatal; in a word, that no one ever had it in a
violent degree twice in his life. They observed farther, that when
the small-pox is of the milder sort, and the pustules have only a
tender, delicate skin to break through, they never leave the least
scar in the face. From these natural observations they concluded,
that in case an infant of six months or a year old should have a
milder sort of small-pox, he would not die of it, would not be
marked, nor be ever afflicted with it again.
In order, therefore, to preserve the life and beauty of their
children, the only thing remaining was to give them the small-pox in
their infant years. This they did by inoculating in the body of a
child a pustule taken from the most regular and at the same time the
most favourable sort of small-pox that could be procured.
The experiment could not possibly fail. The Turks, who are people
of good sense, soon adopted this custom, insomuch that at this time
there is not a bassa in Constantinople but communicates the small-