“I am sorry, ma petite,” said her repentant mother, bending down and stroking her hair. “I am as impatient as you are, you see, but less kind this morning. You are a fine brave little heart of Hanover. And Britain,” she added as her eyes met Sir Hans’s.
In another room of the palace, the surgeons opened young Spencer’s body in hopes of finding some reason for his death. There was some water on the brain, they reported. But they found nothing to quash the screaming of bloody murder in the press.
“You would think they were glad of the boy’s death,” grumbled Sergeant Amyand.
“They are,” said Sir Hans.
The next morning, on the twenty-third, Princess Emily had her wish to be ill. Having been first snapped at by both father and mother, and then praised for being brave, she was absurd, heartbreaking stoicism itself, in a pale shade of green. Little Ann Amyand—just the age poor Sunderland’s child had been—fell ill the same day, Sergeant Amyand was unutterably happy to report. Lord Bathurst reported his four girls ill the next day.
“Your sons, then, do not groan?” asked the Prince of Wales.
“Not yet,” said Bathurst.
“My son will be even so,” said the prince. “You will see.”
No one bothered to remind him that he had two sons; he and the princess did their best not to think of their eldest son, Frederick, made a stranger by long absence in Germany.
On the twenty-fifth, Caro’s rash appeared; by afternoon, her flecks were rising into blisters.
“When will I have some pocks?” fretted Emily.
“You don’t want them,” said Anne with a shudder. “Loathsome, squashy, smelly things.”
“I do,” protested Emily.
“You want a few small ones,” specified her mother, as Emily curled tight against her.
The Princess of Wales had insisted upon spending a rare evening with her daughters. Even more rarely, the king and Prince of Wales took some very deep breaths (as well as a break from Sunderland’s funereal solemnities) and shoved their deep dislike and distrust of each other as far as possible beneath the fragile family truce. For the sake of a mother who wished to be alone with her sick daughters, and for the sake of a front of family solidarity, they went to the Haymarket Theater the same night, and listened to Mr. Handel’s marvelous new opera, Floridante.
Just before Emily went to bed, the rash began to flow across her; by the afternoon, she, too, was sporting blisters. All day long, the sisters watched each other, counting. By sunset, Caro had hit three hundred; Em was still far behind with sixty.
“I assuredly hope the princess Caroline’s rash stops where it is,” said the Princess of Wales, walking with Sir Hans to the outermost room, as he departed. “Where does your daughter stand?” she asked Sergeant Amyand.
“At eighty or ninety, Your Highness.”
“What about your other little one?”
“George presents an interesting case,” said Sergeant Amyand, his distress increasing both visibly and audibly. “His mother had the smallpox when young, madam; when another of our children broke out in the distemper, she nursed him through it, though she was then pregnant with George. As she recalls, the boy soon became more restless and unquiet in the womb than I understand is quite usual—and though she did not miscarry, she tells me now that she believes George had the distemper in utero. At any rate, he has never had the hint of a rash, and his incisions healed on the fourteenth.”
“Don’t tell that story as if it’s an apology, sergeant,” she said kindly. “You make me feel quite the fiend.”
The next morning, Lord Bathurst triumphantly announced that his youngest son, Master Harry, had fallen ill at last. The girls were sprouting spots. His elder son, however, still had no sickness whatsoever, though his incisions festered. The family’s apothecary—he frowned—had chosen this moment to divulge his suspicions that a rash he had treated the young master for a year earlier had actually been the smallpox—and had rendered him immune. “I must say I doubt it,” said Lord Bathurst, “but I cannot make out any other reason why the boy should not be ill.”
He neglected to report that the same day a nineteen-year-old servant—the children’s favorite groom, Bert—had been laid low by flashing pains in the head, aches in his bones, and a high fever. Bert had come up to town from their estate near Cirencester in order to be inoculated with his young summer charges, but he had arrived too late, and the venom used for the children had curdled. So he had been drumming his fingers in the servants’ quarters, waiting for fresh matter to arrive.
Dr. Mead ordered him blooded and vomited, and postponed the inoculation till after his recovery: “If it is still necessary,” remarked the doctor gravely. For his symptoms had all the signs of the smallpox.
“How?” barked Lord Bathurst. To the fury of small stomping feet, he had forbidden Bert’s visits to the nursery until fresh matter could be procured.
“The smallpox, my lord, is insidious,” replied Dr. Mead. “It does not follow orders.”
Bert was removed to the house of the smallpox nurse in Swallow Street.
In the palace, Emily stopped complaining about being first. She began to think that first might really mean best, and that in the matter of pocks, perhaps that meant fewest. The girls drew pictures of each other spotted—some of the pocks very large, others small—but Lady Portland insisted they burn their drawings.
A few days later, Emily at last was first: she lost the first scab. She decided first was fine, after all.
“Not fair,” exclaimed Caro. “You have fewer.”
“I’m first, I’m first,” crowed Emily. “First, first, first.”
Watching all this from afar, through the eyes and ears of Mr. Maitland, Sir Hans, and occasionally her old friend Dr. Arbuthnot, who attended the Bathurst family, Lady Mary wrote to her despondent sister in Paris: I shall say little of the death of our Great Minister because the newspapers say so much. I suppose the same faithful historians give you regular accounts of the growth and spreading of the inoculation of the smallpox, which is become almost a general practice, attended with much success.
To the doctors and surgeons, she kept asking, “Why must you cut so deep?”
And she kept being greeted with hemming and hawing that amounted to no answer at all.
In their house in St. James’s Square, the Bathurst children developed mild cases. To much rejoicing in the nursery, after two days of care under Dr. Mead’s supervision, Bert’s smallpox was declared a false alarm and he was brought home to the Bathurst servants’ quarters. Lord Bathurst, Dr. Mead, and Sergeant Amyand were almost as exhilarated as the children.
Even as their tension eased, however, a particularly rabid Applebee’s began shouting about unchristian murder, claiming that the poor honorable toddler William Spencer had died “of inoculations, a new kind of distemper not known in former days, and an unhappy experiment to this young nobleman, who might in all probability have lived many years, if this operation had not been practiced upon him.”
In a nose-thumbing answer, Mr. Amyand inoculated Lord Bathurst’s Bert two days later.
On the second of May, the Bathurst children’s smallpox ripened quite nicely. “You reduce me to uselessness,” declared Dr. Mead with satisfaction.
By the third, both princesses were out of perceptible danger. Two days later, the last of Emily’s pocks had disappeared, though Caro did not begin to shed hers till the following day. “Perhaps they will cling forever,” said Em, in a temper, after Caro pulled Pierre’s ears.
In St. James’s Square, Lord Bathurst’s children began to scab on the seventh, only twelve days after their inoculations. On the eighth, Bert’s smallpox appeared—so favorable and distinct, and so firmly shooing away his nausea and fever, that congratulations were had all around.
The next morning, however, the singing and laughing stopped as Bert took a sharp turn for the worse. He began vomiting bile and his bowels went loose. His fever returned, carrying his mind into raving
s, and then all of a sudden the infection boiled over and pocks fluxed all over his body, until there was no space for another pock to crawl out.
Despite near round-the-clock care by Dr. Mead and Dr. Arbuthnot, and the weeping prayers of children, Bert died on the twelfth of May.
For one day, all of aristocratic and royal London hunched in stunned silence. “It was a death,” sighed the Princess of Wales at last, “and no death should go unmourned. But it was not an inoculation death, surely.”
On the fourteenth, the earl of Berkeley took her point, and had Sergeant Amyand inoculate his two children; their mother, a legendary beauty, had died of smallpox a year after Lady Mary had battled it. His wife, remarked the earl grimly, had been one of the Princess of Wales’s ladies while she lived; she would surely be urging him to proceed.
On the seventeenth, Mary sat at the Townshends’ holding Dolly’s hand as four of her pretty chickens were infected. On the twenty-second, she sat with Charlotte Tichborne and Lady De La Warr as they submitted their babies to this trial by fire. Suddenly, Lady Mary was run ragged.
In the palace, the girls’ maids slathered heavy cream on their most stubborn sores, but to no avail: on both girls, two or three festered. Those, unfortunately, left their marks: but not badly, and in no material place—on the arm, the leg, the back. Their incisions kept running for about five weeks. In the end, Caro had the last laugh; her incisions stopped running on the twenty-third. Anne Amyand’s had dried up two weeks earlier, a fact Sergeant Amyand did his best not to mention. Princess Emily’s dripped for two more days, until the twenty-fifth. That day, Dr. Sloane, Dr. Steigerthal, and Sergeant Amyand examined them carefully, and pronounced both little girls free and clear.
Their mother held them close for what seemed like hours. “We will not see her so often anymore,” said Em to Caro as they watched her depart.
“Could we be sick again?” asked Caroline.
“Not with the smallpox,” sighed Emily.
The next day, they were seen in the park, taking the air with their sister, Princess Anne.
The incisions on Lord Bathurst’s children healed much sooner than their grief. The earl of Berkeley’s son did marvelously well: only seventy or eighty small pustules that clung to him a mere nine or ten days and then scurfed off, leaving no trace of their passage. His sister, Lady Betty, did not fare quite so lightly. Her pocks were numberless and larger, and she had a swelling on her right shoulder: a large abscess lodged under her deltoid muscle, which eventually had to be lanced.
“You must stop all this cutting,” Lady Mary said in cold fury to Sir Hans, drawing him out of the girl’s bedchamber. “You must! That poor girl’s incisions resemble suicide gashes more than cuts.”
“The poison must vent, my lady, and the longer incisions are widely thought to help.”
“They do not help. Lady Betty may have received the smallpox by inoculation, but her case is no different from a severe case of the distinct small-pox, received in the natural way. The Turks do not cut at all—only scratch, and they do not have such complications.”
“You must allow us to improve somewhat upon the Turks.”
“But you are not improving it!” she cried. “You are turning it into a physician’s bloody goldmine.”
Sir Hans had known Lady Mary most of her life. She saw him try his best to forgive her, as he drew himself tall, his nose pinching into a thin disapproving line.
“I am afraid you are thinking with your heart rather than your head, Lady Mary. The college—and I daresay the nation—owe you thanks for your part in promoting the practice. But in matters of medical knowledge, my lady, you must allow the college to make the decisions it sees fit.”
She fled, shaking with rage. In Covent Garden, she hurtled up the steps and into her Turkish sitting room, where she paced furiously around the room, picking up this trinket and that, on the edge of hurling them all in a grand shattering rain of china, crystal, and silver. As she began to calm down, she stood panting at the window, fighting back tears of fury. This would never do. What was the good in weeping or breaking things?
In the window, she caught a faint reflection of a Turkish robe draped over a chair on the other side of the room. She stalked over to it, swirled it around her shoulders, and sat down cross-legged at her low writing desk. Then she rang for paper, ink, and pen.
How could they dismiss forty years of practice that worked, for the sake of theories that eminently did not? How?
She had been a Turkish merchant before, when she wished to tread where no woman was allowed; by Mahomet and his crescent, she would do it again.
I am determin’d to give a true account of the manner of inoculating the small-pox, she wrote, as it is practised at Constantinople with constant success, and without any ill consequence whatever. I shall sell no drugs, nor take no fees . . . that is, I shall get nothing by it, but the private satisfaction of having done good to mankind, and I know nobody that reckons that satisfaction any part of their Interest .
Two people had been murdered, she raged. Not by the operation, but by the physicians: by their “preparations” that weakened bodies just when they needed all their strength to fight off infection, by the miserable gashes they slashed through their patients’ arms, and by the vast quantities of purulent matter they pasted into the wounds by the tankardful. She scratched through her conclusion without pause, sanded it, and rang for a glass of wine. All that was left was figuring exactly how to circulate it so that everyone should know it was hers, but no one would be able to prove it.
The physicians and surgeons among her friends were not amused; Dr. Arbuthnot, Dr. Mead, Sir Hans, and Mr. Maitland called upon her in a grand unsmiling delegation. She received them in an impeccably English drawing room.
“Surely, my lady, you can see that physicians per se are not your enemies?” Sir Hans began gruffly.
“Whose enemies?” she asked.
“Drop the masquerade, if you please, my lady,” said Mr. Maitland. “Such subterfuge does not become you.”
“And stubbornness does not become you, gentlemen.”
“Will you not see that the inoculators are not your enemies?” pleaded Dr. Arbuthnot. “I must tell you, Lady Mary: you have flung down the word murder, but the two who died most certainly did not die from inoculation, no matter what you want to argue about incision length. Young Spencer was well through the distemper, and Lord Bathurst’s servant had caught it in the natural way, before being inoculated—though to be sure, he may well have caught it from the inoculated children, or from being sent to the smallpox house. A niggling point, you may say, as you might still like to lay those deaths at medicine’s door: but they did not come about through inoculation.”
“I do not know why you feel the need to lecture me on this point, gentlemen, but seeing that you are, perhaps you will allow me to engage you. I hear what you have said about the deaths, Dr. Arbuthnot, and I must say your reasoning is convincing. But I tell you, I agree with this Turkey merchant: by your changes, you are making the operation far more severe and dangerous than necessary.” She turned to Mr. Maitland. “Surely you can see that?”
“What I see most clearly, my lady, is that those of us who support inoculation would do well to stick together just now. The opposition screams with the fury of a storm from the sea.”
She looked at them all, one by one, and then she rose. They hurried to stand in her wake. “If it comes to a battle for inoculation’s survival, gentlemen, you can count on my support.”
It did come to that, and soon. All summer long, jeering mobs followed the inoculators through the streets, and slurs began winging through the press. “Mr. Maitland is grubbing for money and patronage,” sneered some.
“A new way to murder with impunity!” screeched others. “Guardians will poison their wards in order to come to rich estates.”
“An artificial way of depopulating a whole country,” shouted still others.
The most resounding thunder among the ph
ysicians came from Dr. William Wagstaffe, who had been reading certain pamphlets from the colonies quite carefully. Inoculation does not and cannot communicate smallpox, he argued. Inoculation produces something much closer to chicken pox: so how can it be expected to give protection from smallpox? Infusing the blood with such malignant matter, he argued in the next breath, may lay the foundation for many more terrible diseases.
But what really riled Dr. Wagstaffe was the absurdity of learned men listening to women and foreigners: Physicians at least, who of all men ought to be guided in their judgments chiefly by experience, should not be over hasty in encouraging a practice, which does not seem as yet sufficiently supported either by reason, or by fact, he roared on paper. Posterity will scarcely be brought to believe that an experiment practiced only by a few ignorant women amongst an illiterate and unthinking people should on a sudden—and upon a slender Experience—so far obtain in one of the politest nations in the world as to be received into the Royal Palace.
The Reverend Edmund Massey made pulpits ring with almost as much condemnation as the presses, working himself and his congregation into a froth of righteous hatred. So went Satan forth from the Presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils, from the sole of his Foot unto his Crown, he thundered, proving that the devil himself was the first Inoculator.
Against the paranoia and the prejudice, the Royal Society—or most of it—called for patient reasoning. Dr. Arbuthnot and Dr. James Jurin, the society’s secretary, listened to the arguments of a country doctor from York, and set a move underfoot to apply the cool precision of mathematics to the question of whether or not inoculation worked. Dr. Jurin began to peruse London’s official bills of mortality, and to beg surgeons for their inoculation records.
Someone—Lady Mary never discovered who—leaked her Turkey merchant’s letter to the press. In September, the Flying-Post: or, Post-Master printed a heavily edited version. Two weeks later: Isaac Massey, apothecary of Christ’s and Reverend Massey’s nephew, railed at it as “a sham Turkey Merchant’s letter”—but though he sensed a mask, he could not see behind the disguise.
The Speckled Monster Page 47
