Scholarship on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her involvement in the introduction of smallpox inoculation into 1720s English society generally concurs that, were it not for Montagu, inoculation might never, or would have taken significantly longer to, come about. This article argues that whilst Montagu can take the credit for popularizing the notion of inoculating against smallpox, it was not the method she personally introduced that ended up becoming general practice. Her ‘Turkish’ technique was shunned, not just by the male medical elite, but by those in her female network. For whilst they were evidently convinced by the idea of inoculation, they were not prepared to apply her foreign method, which strayed so considerably outside the bounds of what made sense to them intellectually and morally. Sanctioning a version of inoculation that adhered to the tenets of humoral medicine, they effectively advanced an ‘English’ version of it. These findings not only nuance the true nature of Montagu's contribution to the introduction of smallpox inoculation, but also reveal the extent to which its success depended upon the knowledge, experience and say-so of the female circle who first adopted it.

玛丽·沃特利·蒙塔古夫人的奖学金以及她参与将天花接种引入 1720 年代英国社会的工作普遍同意，如果不是蒙塔古，接种可能永远不会发生，或者需要更长的时间才能发生。本文认为，虽然蒙塔古可以将这一概念的普及归功于接种天花，并不是她亲自介绍的方法，最终成为普遍做法。她的“土耳其式”技术被回避了，不仅是男性医学精英，还有她的女性网络中的那些人。因为虽然他们显然对接种的想法深信不疑，但他们并没有准备好采用她的外国方法，这种方法在智力和道德上都超出了他们所理解的范围。他们批准了一种符合体液医学原则的接种方法，有效地推进了它的“英语”版本。这些发现不仅揭示了蒙塔古对引入天花疫苗的贡献的真实性质，而且揭示了它的成功在多大程度上取决于首先采用它的女性圈子的知识、经验和话语权。