Diplomat's wife, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, caught smallpox in December 1715. It left her without eyelashes and with a deeply pitted skin. Two years later in Turkey, she witnessed inoculation using matter from the pustules of patients with mild cases of smallpox. Most survived to be immune from the disease. By the end of the eighteenth century, numerous practitioners offered an inoculation service.
Terms are as usual.
The Speckled Monster It is hard to imagine the terror that smallpox provoked in the eighteenth century. However, there is no mention of the dreaded disease in Finmere records, and we cannot determine the frequency and severity with which it struck. Fortunately, there are records from nearby villages. Our informant is Henry Purefoy, gentleman landowner at Shalstone whose diaries and letters from the 1730s and 1740s survive. I thank God our Shalstone folks have escaped it hitherto.