The story of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
snip
...
Smallpox was far deadlier than the coronavirus the world is currently battling. Fatality rates were as high as 30%, and many of the dead were children. Those who survived were often left scarred by the disease, which covered the body in blisters
But in the 1700s in the Ottoman Empire, centered around modern day Turkey, some women knew how to stop it.
These women were part of a vast informal network of female medical professionals. "There were a lot of women practitioners in the Ottoman Empire," says Akif Yerlioglu, a historian of Ottoman medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway. They were not allowed into the madrassas, Ottoman universities, but they shared knowledge among themselves, working as faith healers, midwives, surgeons and, even in one case Yerlioglu says, an eye doctor.
What these women knew was this: Take a bit of pus from a smallpox patient and use a needle to scratch a tiny amount just beneath the skin so it gets into the blood of a healthy person. That person would get a mild form of smallpox and become immune to the more serious version.
...
...