Lady Mildmay's medical writings include instructions for making up medicines (not individual prescriptions but remedies to be manufactured in bulk), and sophisticated analysis of the causes and treatment of various diseases, based on the humours theory of Galen as well as on Christian writers. She argued for moderation, maintaining that it was a dangerous thing to wear and distract the humours in the body by extreme purges or extreme cordials. She lists treatments according to the perceived causes of disease (attributing smallpox, for instance, the arch enemy of this masterpiece of nature, to the abundant putrefaction of blood and phlegm in the vessels of the spleen or matrix). She adds lists of substances which affect different parts of the body, and recipes for medicaments.

The year after her father died, the child Anna or Anne Riggs was dangerously ill with smallpox.

The heroine, Fanny Warley, is supposed dead but survives, is supposed poor but turns out to be the daughter of Lady and Sir James Powis and therefore rich; she has smallpox but keeps her beauty. One character is strikingly delicate, which is necessary to the plotting. The abbey and its gardens are presented as a modern-day paradise. The hero is a Lord Darcey, and his marriage to Fanny is accompanied at the end with that of Elizabeth Delves to the only other eligible bachelor in the story (also a lord).

Like Elizabeth Cellier , Nihell claims authority for women from ancient history. It was probably Eve, she says, not Adam, who delivered the first human babies. The mother of Socrates was a midwife, and inoculation for smallpox was a female invention. Midwives know enough anatomy for their purposes, though they need training from their youth in the female art of touching or internal examination. They preserve women's modesty and understand that a midwife needs patience while a woman in labour needs to be cherished, comforted, inheartened. Many of her central points have particular resonance for later feminists: Art should aim at imitating Nature.Mothers can speak for themselves—though, she adds, children cannot. Women must assume liberty enough of mind to shake off the dangerous yoke of masculinist thinking; they must cease to be the dupes . . . of that scientific jargon, employed to throw its learned dust in their eyes.

In her poems she mentions her early friendship and admiration for Richard Valpy , polymath headmaster of Reading School , and Henry Moyes , a scientist and lecturer of Scottish origin (whose intellectual attainments were the more remarkable since he was totally blind from a childhood attack of smallpox). Moyes died in 1807.

FLN and her sister Elizabeth Freke did much visiting back and forth. It was in Frances's London house that her nephew Ralph went through smallpox in August 1684, and that Elizabeth sought refuge during the anxious period of Monmouth's rebellion in July 1685. Lady Norton's house in Somerset was also much frequented by the Freke family, often as a staging post on journeys back and forth between Norfolk and Ireland. In July 1704 she had Ralph Freke there with his wife, to whom she gave a necklace worth a hundred pounds; Elizabeth was there in August 1709. When Ralph and his wife had a daughter in April 1712, Frances and her sister Elizabeth were godparents together, and the baby was named Grace. The year after this Elizabeth remarked on my deer sister Norton giveing my son and daughters rude family the freedome of her house.

This is a story of contrasted sisters, told by an omniscient narrator. Julia Woodville is good while her sister Ellen is haughty and supercilious. Nearly sixteen years before the novel began, their father retired disgusted from court life to the country (a broken-down house near Kendal) with his wife and two daughters. (Another daughter and a son have died from smallpox.) He has a rake's progress behind him, and his wife, once the good orphan Miss Neville, has participated in his return to dissipation and is, unfortunately, a keen novel-reader. The story ends with the expected distribution of rewards and punishments.

Finally escaping from France after surviving smallpox, Augusta settles on her Irish estate with her little son, sets up a school, provides work for her tenants, raises their wages, employs her faithful priest (her former teacher) as her chaplain and pays another priest to minister to the parish. However, she struggles with her mother-in-law over the custody of her son. She remains a philanthropic widow when the story ends. MFCP delivers a closing political message which identifies Ireland's problems as economic, and in the power of landlords to remedy. If other landlords would do their duty, there would soon be an end of these violent struggles between the rich and poor which at this time desolate the kingdom. She signs off: So, patient reader, having waded with me through so much prolixity, I wish thee a good night.

He was never healthy; the trouble was diagnosed as being in his brain. His mother feared he had been marked by the circumstances of her pregnancy (beset by financial worries and disappointed of any inheritance from her uncle). A couple of years later (after Ralph had undergone inoculation for smallpox, with all the aggressive preparation and follow-up which were currently believed in) her fears became more sinister: This poor unfortunate Child will dye at last . . . . What shall I do? What can I do? has the flattery of my Friends made me too proud of my own Brains? & must these poor Children suffer for my crime? Soon after this Ralph died, at twenty months old. Hester Thrale was left a prey to terror whenever one of her children had a headache. Her next baby, Frances Ann, was born two months before Ralph's death and died in a flu epidemic five months after it.

In the public mind MR is remembered primarily as a friend of Robert Burns . She first met him in late 1791. They soon developed a free-and-easy, bantering, affectionate correspondence. It was not exclusively literary: Burns, for instance, offered advice about Riddell's inoculating her small daughter against smallpox (a procedure which Anna Maria went through successfully not long before her sister's birth). The letters that Burns sent Riddell also contain plenty of gallant compliment, and in poetry he wrote (as he did, however, habitually in poems to women) as if he was hopelessly in love.MR , on her side, has been interpreted as addressing him in poetry as my false love, but scholar Hilton Brown , after careful consideration, concludes that there was flirtation on both sides but not love (for one thing, the judicial criticism of Riddell's article just days after Burns's death could hardly have been written by someone who had lost a beloved). Brown believes that each of the pair perceived the other as a remarkable person, and rejoices in the idea of Burns at long last meeting and making friends with a woman who was his peer in vitality of spirit and adventurousness of mind.

MMS 's mother was born Martha Sherwood and was heiress to £10,000 from her father, a merchant in Coventry and London. Shy, unattractive, marked by smallpox, with no interest in clothes or appearance, she was her husband's second choice after the death of the beautiful young woman (her close friend) whom he had planned to marry. She brought up her children with rigour. Later she gave MMS a prayer-book which had been owned by women in the family for five generations. She died on 20 March 1817, after Mary Martha had returned from India.

MS seems to waver about how to conclude her story. Statira's disgrace is salved when the count's sister (a nun) tells him the story of a woman, Idela de Toggenburg, who had the fortitude to leave her unworthy husband and enter a convent, although she loved him. This tale causes Harton to entertain, for the first time, the possibility of his wife's innocence. But Showes chooses after all not to give the novel a happy ending on Statira's vindication. Instead Statira, still not received by her husband, re-appears in the story incognita, in the person of Madame Laborde, a perfect governess for her own children. When the children fall ill with smallpox she nurses them safely through it—only to die of the dread disease herself, leaving her husband to the poignancy of his regrets, for the loss of her, whose worth he did not know how to estimate when living.

As a boy Philip survived an attack of smallpox that left him badly scarred—a fact not evident from the paintings of him.

In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia, works as a servant, and is painfully humble and submissive; nevertheless the book depicts her education and vindication. CS satirises the pretensions of her own sex through the would-be erudite Miss Hollybourn and the literary Mrs Manby, who is given to stealing from other authors, uses cosmetics to disguise the ravages of smallpox, and believes in the teeth of the evidence that she is still attractive to men. (Anna Seward thought Mrs Manby to be based on Hannah More ; others have suggested Hannah Cowley .) Perhaps most interesting character is the unsympathetic, powerful, problematic Mrs Rayland, a Queen Elizabeth in private life, who holds the protagonists' inheritance in her grasp. The hero, Orlando Somerive, has a drunken, gambling spendthrift of an elder brother whose father cannot control him, very much in the style of Smith's own husband. Orlando travels with the British army to America; scenes there feature idealised liberty and his friendship or brotherhood with a native American. New York State is given a lush, tropical landscape, in which Orlando is taken captive and begins to write poetry. During his absence Monimia is subjected to emotional harassment and attempted rape; her happy ending leaves her contentedly dependent on Orlando's protection.

Mary Eleanor had a precocious flirtation, at thirteen, with the fifteen-year-old Campbell Scott, younger brother of a duke. When Scott left school to go into the army, the pair exchanged rings, but soon afterwards he died of smallpox. After him came a string of admirers, one of them a young Italian marchese.

She had survived a bout of smallpox about eighteen months before this.

His father, John Hatch Synge , was a barrister from an originally English family which had established itself for generations in Ireland and had until recently owned estates in County Wicklow. He died of smallpox in spring 1872 and was buried on his youngest son's first birthday.

CT 's father, the Rev. Edward Talbot, one of eight sons of a bishop, and himself an archdeacon, died of smallpox in a notorious epidemic on 9 December 1720, five months before she was born.

Mr Tudor in this text is of course based on AT 's husband Philip . He first appears as the husband of Lady Elizabeth, who was as remarkable for his sense and penetration, as he was for every amiable quality that can do honour to a man. Volume two opens with Lady Elizabeth bearing a son and dying a few months later. Her widower's marriage to Euterpe is somewhat clumsily handled: Euterpe feels for the motherless baby a tenderness which she ever after evinced when he became her son-in-law [i.e. stepson]; but little did she then think that such an event would ever take place! After Euterpe marries Mr Tudor the novel calls her, consistently, Mrs Tudor, and the first topic is the way she cherishes her stepchildren, making no difference between them and her own. This slides naturally into one of AT 's favourite topics: that of the importance of education in shaping the moral life. This volume has minimal plot: the Tudors' first cottage is described in detail, together with the hospitality they exercise there on several occasions. Euterpe gives free rein to her theatrical talent in her domestic life, staging a pastoral mode of leisure activity in which the elder step-daughter, the maid, a lamb and a cow each has a role to play. Other people's lives are discussed and critiqued. The Tudors travel with their three daughters to France, where the two eldest are left at a convent to perfect their French. There the younger falls dangerously ill with smallpox and the elder increases in religious fervour to the extent of choosing to become a nun. This part of the narrative is supplemented by Mrs Tudor's letters from abroad; the closing pages are occupied with an anecdote about the sagacity of a dog.

As an infant, the future queen was breast-fed, and vaccinated against smallpox.

EW 's account of her own life shows her pride in her forebears and her pleasure in anecdotes from which she can draw a moral lesson. She treats her childbirth experiences succinctly, linking them to her thanksgiving to God for deliverance. She goes into more detail about family illnesses, where medical specifics accompany the words of prayer and religious meditation. She writes what the Quakers would call testimonies on the dead, beginning with her daughter Mary, who sweetly fell asleep in Jesus Christ at the age of six and a quarter on 21 January 1669, after being ill for four days with a sudden, violent sore throat. She touchingly describes the child's piety and her acceptance of the prospect of her own death, recording her hope that Mary is now happy in heaven. Like Mary Carey she concludes her account of her dead child by turning to the living: Lord I bless thee that of Eleven, for whom I Praise thee, thou hast yet spared me two. The death of her daughter Elizabeth at sixteen and a quarter from smallpox elicits a parallel narrative of loss, grief, and soul-searching, including a story of how the young Elizabeth once feared she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the sin which would not be forgiven. Again EW turns to the living: I bless thee that thou still intrusts us Parents to a Child.

It was much longer than her previous three novels, and its tone, pace, and purpose were significantly different. It depicts revolutions without veering into quaintness or romanticism, and is instead permeated with a sense of historical reality. A gentlewoman whose children die of smallpox experiences a growing intimacy with her estranged husband's mistress, and the two women become involved in the two revolutions taking place in Paris in February and June 1848. The women eventually espouse the Communist cause.

The twenty-year-old son of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick , died of smallpox, leaving her crushed by sorrow and guilt.

After Queen Mary died of smallpox, JW was impelled by God to go from Putney, where she lived, to London proper, and call the people to fasting instead of feasting.