She was left (in her own words) totally disfigured, with some damage to her left eye, by an attack of smallpox when she was four years old, of which a younger brother died..

A severe epidemic of smallpox resulted in 3,500 deaths in London, more than seventeen per cent of all recorded deaths this year.

Among the pleasures of FB 's life-writing are the way it revels in nonce-words and other innovative uses of language, and the play it makes with dramatic techniques like scene-setting and dialogue. Many famous passages reflect her vivid apprehension of the world around her, and her ability to capture it in language: the sequence about her entry into the limelight as a published author; her accounts of Johnson and other famous figures; her moonlight conversation with the mad king after he had pursued her and she had run away; steady attendance at the trial of Warren Hastings ; the harrowing detail of her unanaethetized mastectomy; the turmoil of living in Brussels when the armies gathered before, and came back in broken fragments after, the battle of Waterloo. She is a perceptive delineator of people: in sketches of suitors both longed-for and unwanted—in which, however, discretion and reticence somewhat mute the story—of her husband's vegetable gardening, or her small son getting his inoculation for smallpox. She is, besides, equally skilled in rendering interiority: her early painting of scenes in which romantic interest is hinted or implied rather than expressed; the ups and downs of her whirlwind, bilingual, middle-aged courtship; the feelings with which, as an elderly wife, she watched from an upstairs window her beloved, also elderly husband mount his horse and ride off with the French monarchist army; and those with which she made her way, alone, among real, unpredictable dangers to join him.

More seriously, the same period saw her small daughter Jane suffering from the smallpox. With the rash covering the child's body and temporarily blinding her, AY wrote, if she survives this night, I hope to possess her a little longer. She later said her assiduous care had enabled Jane to survive with her looks very little impaired.

The Royal College of Physicians made public their official approval of inoculation for smallpox, as introduced to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu thirty-three years before.

The finished work, published in 1808, begins with a sketch of the history of what became New York State, and continues to cover a good deal of political and historical matters. In the second volume the autobiographical emerges, in detail of AG 's childhood reading habits and her developing relationship with her previously unknown father. In addition to the description of Schuyler's life, AG's memoirs incorporate the history of Albany, New York, and the nearby Five Nations native settlement, including comment on King Hendrick , sovereign of the Five Nations. She consistently praises and defends the Mohawks, those interesting and deeply reflecting natives,those generous tribes . . . those valuable allies. The lurking ambivalence of her positions is indicated by the way she insists that the Mohawks are not like other Indians, and again in her calling their language indeed . . . noble and copious—especially considering that it served as the vehicle of thought to a people whose ideas and sphere of action we should consider as so very confined. She introduces her passage on women in Indian society (at one point she uses the phrase [a]n Indian or native American) with a quotation from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writing on Vienna as a paradise for old women; this emphasizes her point about the respect shown in native American society towards older women (those who have given birth to a warrior) although she also insists on the Mohawk women's perpetual drudgery and the slavish employments considered beneath the dignity of the men, to which she says they are confined until they qualify for respect. She discusses the various visits of Native American dignitaries to England, denies that Indians are indolent though she accepts that they are drunken. She shows a political grasp of the forces acting on them: she entitles one chapter Means by which the Independence of the Indians was first diminished. These means included the trading relationship and the introduction of alcohol. The Mohawks, she notes, considered drink and smallpox as a moral and a physical plague which we had introduced among them, for which our arts, our friendship, and even our religion, were a very inadequate recompence. The Indians, she says, should shame us Christians.

Though only about twenty percent of its extracts are written by women (the same proportion as from the Bible), this book is feminist in its emphasis on the virtue of independent judgement as well as the conventional virtue of the conduct books. The last paragraph of its preface begins, As we are created accountable creatures we must run the race ourselves.MW includes work by herself and eight other women (Genlis —much used—Trimmer , Chapone , Talbot , Charlotte Smith , Elizabeth Carter , Anna Letitia Barbauld —represented by excerpts from almost everything she had ever published—and Lady Pennington ), as well as passages on Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots . She includes Samuel Johnson 's two Rambler essays about Victoria, who is roused from despair after losing her beauty to smallpox when another woman tells her she is born to know, to reason, and to act.

This novel opens in a village containing the gothic priory of Ruthinglenne, in one of the richest and most luxuriant counties in the northern part of England. The heroine, Benigna, is the daughter of a soldier (Benignus) whose choice of career killed his mother with grief, and who comes home only long enough for his pregnant wife to give birth before both depart to war. The baby is brought up by her clergyman grandfather. (Her inoculation for smallpox at six months is treated in detail; she is thought in some danger, but survives.) When she is four, her grandfather goes mad as a delayed reaction to her father's death in a duel. After the deaths of both her grandfather and her guardian, her marriage to Lord Ruthinglenne is prevented by the dramatic warning of an admonitory ghost. Her various sufferings before the happy ending include being drugged and abducted to a brothel.

The story follows its hero's unsurprising metamorphosis: he begins as the socially negligible James Treton, an orphan, assistant in an accoucheurs' and surgeon-apothecaries' practice, and ends as Arthur, Duke of Avon. It opens with nicely done low-life scenes, in which the medical partners and brothers-in-law, Slade and the butcherly Dalton, fall out over the charge of malpractice leading to a woman's death. As James Treton, the hero loves Mary Milton, daughter of a Spitalfields weaver: they correspond illicitly and amusingly ascribe perfection to each other. James is well-read: his knowledge takes in both Pope and Germaine de Staël . When he goes down with smallpox he laments the impending loss of his beauty in a comic episode of reversed gender roles. After this he suffers from temporary blindness just as the revelations of his inherited grandeur begin, and he opens his eyes to find himself in a house appointed with Arabian-nights wealth and exoticism. His loss of Mary is sweetened by her turning out to be married as well as giddy, vain, and altogether unsuitable. Instead he loves and marries Louisa.

The ghost (supposed to be that of a young woman who had recently died while pregnant) appeared to a girl in whose family home the woman had lodged while living, to accuse her lover of her murder. The lover claimed that he had been devoted to her (they would have been married but for the prohibition on marrying a deceased wife's sister) and that she died of smallpox. But the allegation investigated was that of a ghost, not that of a murder.

General Jeffrey Amherst , British commander in North America, suggested that smallpox might advantageously be introduced among the disaffected tribes of Indians currently being led in rebellion by Pontiac .

Her marriage may have been short-lived. By 9 October 1795 she was a widow with a young son to support. She had just suffered the alarm of his going through a smallpox attack, but he survived.

This does not exhaust the list of her relatives who were earning their living on the stage. AH was, however, on bad terms with most of them from an early age. She felt herself to be the rejected member of the family, because she had a limp and a squint, and carried the scars of smallpox.

Charles was in some sense the upwardly-mobile member of the family. Although he toiled as a clerk or office-worker, which he hated, he also worked as a journalist and later as an essayist, and from his schooldays onwards he made literary friends. He remained extremely close to the sister who had been his nurse, teacher, companion and example. He suffered as a child from what was probably polio and from smallpox which nearly killed him. He developed before he went to school a severe stammer which remained through his adult life, along with general puniness and near-lameness. At Christ's Hospital School he endured harsh discipline and corporal punishment but delighted in membership of a community from which he brought away lifelong friendships. He grew up to be an intellectual and an eccentric, holding strong views on the importance of a gentility defined not by birth but manners, and on the gallantry and deferential respect due from men to women.

The title-page quotes Anna Seward . JH uses a more elaborate style in this novel than formerly. It centres on Matilda, daughter of the widowed Earl of Colchester, and on Mrs Clarendon, the widow of a colonel, who at the outset of the novel is engaged as Matilda's governess and mother-figure. This gossipy, domestic, upper-class novel covers two generations and deals with child-rearing issues such as inoculation for smallpox.

Christian was still a child when she went blind, probably as a result of the smallpox attack which scarred her badly. When she was in her twenties or thirties, the suggestion was made that she should apply for admission to the Asylum for the Blind at Edinburgh, and she got so far as to write a sketch of her life apparently designed for selectors. It is not clear whether or not she actually applied; in any event, she never entered the Asylum. Though as a young woman she could walk outdoors unaided, later in life (still in her forties) she had difficulty walking.

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.

London, with a population estimated at three quarters of a million and after fifty years of inoculation in England, recorded well over a thousand deaths from smallpox. This was less than the previous major epidemic twenty-one years before, but still considered average.

Louis XV of France, great-grandson and immediate successor of the Sun King , died of smallpox, and was succeeded by his grandson Louis XVI .

At Yetminster in Dorset during a smallpox epidemic, a farmer named Benjamin Jesty transferred cowpox matter from cattle into scratches in the arms of his wife and two small sons.

She died when expected to recover, having already, after inoculation for smallpox, recovered when expected to die.

Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.She makes no critical comment on the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs Godwin), for whom her sources were contemporary magazines, but refuses to criticise her actions. She calls her [t]his singular woman and writes matter-of-factly: [u]ncomfortable at home, she left it. (Since MMB had done the same, she would not be likely to disapprove.) With equal matter-of-factness she identifies Eliza Haywood 's latter and best works. She is discreet about Mary Robinson and spiritedly defends Sappho against imputations with which her memory is loaded and which may be due, she says, to the malice of Ovid . (On the other hand she swallows whole the story of Sappho choosing to die for love of Phaon). She is a brisk, effective critic and historian. Jane Shore she sums up as famous for her Beauty, Wit, Misfortunes, and Penitence. The characteristics of Susanna Centlivre 's plays are bustle, spirit, and plot. Macaulay's history is a violent attack on the whole race of the Stuarts. Mention of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu causes her to compute the number of lives so far saved by smallpox inoculation at 139,652. She effectively marshals her scholarly arguments to maintain that Dorothy, Lady Pakington , was the real author of The Whole Duty of Man.