[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_95

Lady Montagu and the Dragoman: an adventurous journey to the origins of

vaccines, Maria Teresa Giaveri, 2021

The book, released in the midst of the pandemic, has a rather familiar undertone even though it deals with events that occurred three hundred years ago:

 “In London, a suspicious death is enough to fuel the controversy – which sees the Wigh party (pro-inoculation) and the Tory party (against) aligned. The apocalyptic tones of some preachers, who cry out about ‘satanic possession’ or insinuate that an attempt is being made to depopulate the country by artfully spreading the epidemic, are answered by James Jurin’s statistics, the authority of the royal doctor, the prestige of the Crown. The oriental and feminine origin of the practice is seen as the weak point, the one to attack more decisively when the controversy moves from the religious area to the medical field: ‘Posterity will hardly believe that an experiment practised by a few ignorant women among an illiterate and unreasonable people, should have obtained at once, with a minimum of experimentation, a reception in the bosom of the Royal Palace of one of the most civilized Nations in the world’, wrote William Wagstaffe at the end of an impassioned plea for doctors: let them not allow their profession to be usurped by amateurs! Subtly mentioned in that pamphlet as a ‘bloody traveller from Turkey’, Mary Montagu responded with an article, published in the ‘Flying Post’ on 13 September 1722 under the pseudonym of ‘a Turkish Merchant’: A Plain Account of the Inoculating of the Small Pox. As she had already written in one of her Eastern letters, it was her firm belief that many doctors were moved more by interest and the need to reaffirm their role than by concern for public health: hence the blindness of the traditionalists, who scorned the method of inoculation because it was ‘practiced by ignorant women’ […]”.

I remember reading the book in a couple of days in a state of feverish excitement: the fact that the inoculation of the virus was an ancient practice carried out by peasant women in the Greek-Turkish populations and that it had then been rediscovered and valorized by another woman and courageously brought to England as a solution to the pandemic, was something that had deeply touched me. Yet another case of collective knowledge produced and passed down by women, forgotten or deliberately erased from History because it was linked to three great unforgivable negatives: being a woman, being poor, being oriental.

In this landscape of ancient and mysterious knowledge, the character of Lady Montagu stood out like a diamond: “it took a woman to understand certain things” I found myself thinking proudly; appreciating the fact that a woman of an upper class had managed to go beyond class prejudices. I quickly became passionate about her story. I discovered that she was a great traveller, that she had stayed several times in Venice (my adoptive city); that her husband was the Earl of Sandwich and that he was responsible for the birth of the most mainstream fast food of the century.

Then, a few days ago, while I was walking through York Minster Park with an African colleague, I noticed on the wall of a building a blue sign that I had never paid attention to before. The sign read “Lady Montagu.” I stopped dead in my tracks. Was that her? Was she a relative? Was that the family home? My colleague noticed a change in me. “Do you know her?” she asked, her voice trailing a little. I, not paying attention to the tired note in her tone, and not even being certain that the Lady Montagu of the palace was really my heroine (and she wasn’t), I began to tell her like a raging torrent the incredible story of that woman, the fact that she was an ambassador, an intellectual woman with liberal ideas, the central role she played in bringing the practice of inoculation to England, how little she was known, etc.

My colleague listened to me patiently in silence. When I had finished, “What a strange thing,” she said almost sighing “here in Europe, wherever a person goes, they find History, always History and more History. There are castles, old medieval walls, Roman ruins, Renaissance palaces, Museums with everything that cannot be left out. And most of the time what you remember are bad things. Massacres, wars, famines, people who have killed or tyrannized. It is like a curse, your past.”

I was speechless. My academic background is that of a Historian and, ever since I was nine years old and decided that I would grow up to be Indiana Jones, I had always firmly believed in the importance of memory, of historical documentation, of preservation for posterity; I had also firmly believed in what I considered an absolute: the extraordinary beauty and power of historical heritage. But in that moment, there in front of the gates of Montagu Palace, with my colleague, something shady had insinuated itself for the first time in my bright vision of culture; and that something was doubt.

Behind my colleague’s words there was a different perspective than mine, an outside view that I didn’t have. There was a historical awareness that clashed loudly with everything I considered “truth” but that also showed me clearly how Europe was not the only unit of measurement in the world.

It suddenly came to mind - as some forgotten memories sometimes do - how the Europeans had systematically erased the cultures of the peoples they had colonized and exploited, in Africa and South America. It reminded me of the surgical operation carried out for centuries to caustically eliminate millennia-old knowledge from the pages of History; destroying not only artifacts, buildings and cities but also rites, beliefs, shared perspectives and languages. Taking away millions of lives, along with all their stories. The Europeans had stripped the exploited populations even of their very memory, they had taken away their identity.

These are not things that should be forgotten; they are a fundamental part of that same History that should be preserved, passed down and remembered. And yet I had forgotten them, as one forgets a name, a birthday, a shopping list. Perhaps because these things are not as glorious, as beautiful, as all the other things that Europeans are used to remembering. Yes, even in "massacres, wars, famines", as my colleague said, there is something glorious and beautiful, something that many define as "epic": the dawn and dusk of an era; the creative power of a victory; the collective resistance to a threat; the change of customs, the rewriting of values, the contamination of knowledge, the invention of a tradition. In the epic of European historical memory there are often “good guys” and “bad guys” and it is easy to imagine who people identify with: in the religious wars that devastated Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries no one is on the side of the Inquisition; just as no one identifies with the conservative opposition to women's suffrage in the early 1900s or with the Nazi-fascist parties of the Second World War. Remembering these historical events means marking a positive: that the mistake has been recognized, that one does not want to repeat it. In other words, that one has moved on to the side of the "good guys". But in colonial history you can’t do the same. The consequences of European colonial history are so intertwined with our present that you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. And maybe that’s why we don’t talk about it at all, or we talk about it with difficulty, a bit through gritted teeth. In this part of history there can be no positive identification for any European: Europe, all of it, has been on the side of the “bad guys” and this is a difficult awareness to manage especially if the past is linked to the presentand it risks transforming us, contemporary Europeans, into bad actors of history. Just as when we end up not seeing those we don’t want to greet on the street, we tend to avoid dealing with this part of history and we easily forget how many great names of modern Western culture, much studied and still much admired (Montagu family included), were slave owners, fervent colonialists, supporters of the imperialist government or joyful beneficiaries of the system. We are outraged by how patriarchy forgets the women who made history but at the same time we choose not to remember how the Western Enlightenment, of which those same women are a part, was made possible by policies of mass human exploitation.

That day, in that park, with my colleague, I felt deeply ashamed: it was the first time I realized my Eurocentrism; and how much this Eurocentrism was imbued with pro-European bigotry, nationalist pride and unconscious racism. Strange to say, but precisely in the land of memory - as my colleague had called Europe - there is a worrying collective dissociative amnesia.