Ottoman Empire and United Kingdom: Heretical Medicine
"Dr. William Wagstaffe, who was […] a physician at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, immediately wrote that a different climate meant variolation could not work and argued in particular about the different constitution of ethnic English ‘whose blood, speaking of it as national, is the product of the richest diet’, and combined with quantities of alcohol was more susceptible to inflammation; this echoed the constitutional theory from 1580 by Timothy Bright, who emphasized such differences between England and ‘strange nations’. Dr. Warren of Bury-St.-Edmunds thought the difference between mild and malignant smallpox depended on the personality of the person. There were reservations as to whether other diseases, especially the dreaded syphilis, ‘the great pox’, would transmit with the inoculum, and whether variolation could cause abortion.” (Grant, 2019, p. 39-40)
Expectedly, resistance to the novel medical practice of variolation emerged in virtually all countries in which it was introduced, and this opposition could strike from various sectors of society. Politicians, religious officials, and even other physicians railed against variolation. In England there were clergyman who objected to variolation as interference in God's Providence, for disease was one of God's ways of punishing the wicked and testing the saintly. Rev. Theodore Delafaye fretted that if the threat of smallpox were eliminated, people would become immoral because they no longer feared divine punishment. As shown by the quote above, the objections of English physicians were myriad: doctors worried that non-smallpox diseases could be spread through contaminated samples, that variolation was not potent enough to grant full immunity, that mixing blood of people of different social statuses or sexes could dilute aristocratic bloodlines or create "hermaphrodites".
Mahomet, George I's Turkish valet
1715 portrait print by George Kitchin of Mahomet, one of King George I's two Turkish valets
The foreign origins of variolation unsurprisingly triggered xenophobic reactions. The chaplain of variolation pioneer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reportedly advised against the practice because it was Muslim in origin and therefore could not help Christians. At least one British polemicist wrote of variolation as if it were an Islamic invader, melodramatically warning that variolation was "practised by profest Enemies of the Cross of Christ and Infidels, who sacrifice their Fellow Creatures as a Peace Offering to the Devil" (Grant, p. 65). Anti-Ottoman sentiments were also stoked by current events in Britain: King George I employed two turbaned Turkish valets, Mustapha and Mahomet, and the two men made a tidy fortune for themselves by selling their influence to help arrange palace appointments.
Meccan Merchant and his Circassian Slave
Portrait of a representative of the Grand Sharif of Mecca (right) and his Circassian slave taken by C. Snouck Hurgronje between 1886 and 1887
Arabs from the area around Mecca
Photograph by Pascal Sebah of Arabs living in the region of the Ottoman Empire near Mecca, taken in the 1860s
This xenophobic reaction is rather ironic: Turkish Muslims also had religious scruples about variolation. Within the Ottoman Empire, variolation was believed to have been introduced by the Christian Circassians and Georgians, and it was from her Greek neighbors that Lady Mary learned of variolation. According to Jacobus Pylarini, he performed variolated people of various ethnicities within the Ottoman Empire, but never the Turkish majority, who refused him. According to another physician, Antoine Timoni, the Turks he encountered had an acute sense of predestination and refused to accept variolation because one must die at the time God had decided for them, not unlike British Christians who feared variolation interfered with God's Providence. The British chaplain and travelogue author Dr. Thomas Shaw attests that forms of smallpox inoculation existed among Jews and Arab Muslims living in the Levant and the Barbary Coast (presently known as the Maghreb), yet the practice was highly disreputable in the latter community, owing to stories of variolation backfiring and causing significant harm. The European misconception that variolation was a Turkish Muslim practice likely emerged from misreporting of variolation practices in the Ottoman Empire, as well as a general tendency to associate anything Ottoman with Turks and Muslims. Europeans often treated "Turks" and "Muslims" as synonyms, which only added further to their confusion.