Water, Wastes, and Health in Hot Climates

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 edition. Excerpt: ... the Porte, and Lady Mary had the advantage, for two or three years, of studying Eastern manners under unusually favourable circumstances. From 1739 to 171 sne resided principally in vi LADY MARY MONTAGU 205 Italy. It was her habit, during her long periods of exile from England, to write copiously to friends at home, and when a selection from these letters was published in 1763 Lady Mary was recognised at once as having been one of the wittiest of English letter-writers. She took pains to introduce into this country in 1717 the Turkish practice of inoculation for the smallpox, and it is in a letter to Miss Sarah Chiswell, from Adrianople, on ist April of that year, that she first mentions this subject, in the following terms: " I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish yourself here. 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. There is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins. The Grecians have...