Lady Mary Wortley Montaguthe ArenaENTP

In April 1721, with smallpox sweeping through London, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 31, had her three-year-old daughter given the disease on purpose.

The surgeon, Charles Maitland, scratched matter from a smallpox sore into the little girl's skin, so that she would have a mild case and never catch it again. Nobody in England was known to have done this before. If the child died, it would be his name on it, and by one account he asked for witnesses.

Lady Mary knew exactly what she was betting against. Smallpox had killed her brother in 1713. In 1715, at 26, it nearly killed her too, and left her face scarred.

In 1716 her husband was made ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. On 1 April 1717, at 27, she wrote from Adrianople to her friend Sarah Chiswell about something she had watched there. Old women scratched smallpox matter into children's skin. The children ran a short fever and were safe for life. The disease that killed so many at home, she wrote, was “entirely harmless” here.

Then came the sentence Arenas will recognize.

She had seen the contradiction at once. In England, smallpox was a killer and also a living. In one light clause she accused a whole profession of putting its income first. It read like a joke. It turned out to be a forecast.

She did not invent the practice. Ottoman and Greek women had done it for generations, and reports had already reached London, where learned men read them and did little. What she did was believe it and stake her family on it. In March 1718, in Constantinople, her son Edward, nearly five, was inoculated by an old Greek woman and Maitland between them.

Back in London, the physicians pushed back. So in September 1722, at 33, she wrote a defense of inoculation for The Flying-Post and signed it as a Turkey merchant.

It was a clever coat to wear. A titled woman famous for her wit was easy to wave away. A merchant who had simply been there and seen it was believed. By one account, the paper still cut her sharpest lines. The disguise got the argument into print, but the jokes stayed outside.

She kept at it for years, long after being right had stopped being fun. Arenas are said to love the first act and drift off before the second. She stayed for the second. Her granddaughter later called the whole campaign thankless.

Her family carried part of the cost. Her children had been the evidence. In 1753, writing to that same daughter about a clever granddaughter, she said the girl should learn all she wanted and hide it as carefully as a crooked back or a lame leg.

She died in 1762, at 73. In 1794 the daughter who had been inoculated in the epidemic burned the diary her mother had kept since her marriage. She had been her mother's proof once. The last word on what the world would see was hers.