Preserving the Inventory

An Essay on Voltaire’s 1733 Case for Inoculation

On 29 December 2020, cameras rolled while Vice President-elect Kamala Harris pushed back her sleeve and received her COVID-19 injection on live television. Between that broadcast and the middle of 2021, dozens more staged injections followed. Presidents, prime ministers, the aged British monarch, the visible faces of every major government. The scene had a stable format. A rolled sleeve, an extended arm, a syringe held aloft for the shot before the shot, then the theatrical smile for the cameras. The point of the ritual was never medical. It was authorization from above.

The founding text of this ritual was written in 1733. Sasha Latypova pointed to it recently in her conversation with Dr. Andrew Kaufman on The True Health Report,¹ and I went looking for it. Its author was Voltaire: French philosopher, correspondent of Frederick the Great, later a resident of the Panthéon. He devoted one of his Letters Concerning the English Nation to arguing that the French should adopt the English practice of inoculating healthy children with pustule material taken from the bodies of the sick.² He called the essay “Inoculation.” It ran under ten pages. He wrote it as propaganda for a practice he considered enlightened. Read now, with no obligation to accept his framework, it becomes something Voltaire never meant it to be: an unusually candid account of what inoculation was, where it came from, who was experimented on to establish it, and by what rhetorical means dissent was to be dismissed.

Every element of the modern vaccination story is present in the founding document. The commercial origin. The aristocratic imprimatur. The captive-population experiment. The contempt for opponents. The physical procedure of inserting decomposing tissue into a healthy child’s body. Voltaire says all of it aloud.

All of this predates Edward Jenner by sixty-five years. The apparatus of Western vaccination was in place when Voltaire wrote: the practice, the pipeline, the aristocratic imprimatur, the contempt for dissent. Jenner was not yet born. He would be born in 1749, twenty-eight years after the Newgate experiment, and would publish his refinement in 1798. He is credited with founding modern vaccination. His contribution, substituting cowpox material for smallpox material, changed the substance introduced. It did not change the mechanism.

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The vocabulary was set in the founding text

Voltaire opens the essay by classifying anyone who resists the practice. Those who do not inoculate their children are, in his phrase, “fools and madmen.”³ The rest of Europe, in refusing what England has adopted, is “unnatural and cowardly.”³ He wonders whether the French “set a lower value upon life.” He accuses the doctors and curates of France of holding back their countrymen through mere prejudice. He closes the essay with the observation that “prejudice, as usual, first got possession of the pulpit, and reason could not reach it till long after.”³

The vocabulary was set here. A reader of American, British, or European media between March 2020 and the end of 2022 knows the terms already. Vaccine resisters were selfish, ignorant, superstitious, dangerous: enemies of reason, killers of grandmothers, purveyors of misinformation, agents of foreign disruption. Every insult that landed in a New York Times op-ed had already been printed in 1733. The consistency is not coincidence. The vocabulary is functional. It exists to make dissent unthinkable before argument begins.

Voltaire also names one specific opponent, an unnamed London curate who had preached against inoculation before the bishop of Worcester preached in favor of it. The curate had suggested that Job in the Book of Job had been inoculated by the devil. Voltaire dismisses him: the man “spoiled a good Capuchin, for which nature seems to have intended him.”³ The insult carries a structural point. Religious authority that opposed the practice was mocked; religious authority that endorsed it was quoted as evidence. The bishop of Worcester was welcomed to the pulpit. The curate was told to go be a monk.

The pattern is intact three centuries later. The doctor who resists is stripped of credentials; the doctor who complies is elevated to television.

The circuit ran from Constantinople to the throne

Voltaire tells the transmission story plainly. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Constantinople with her ambassador husband, observed the Ottoman practice and had her own son inoculated there in defiance of her chaplain, who “remonstrated that this practice was by no means consistent with Christian principles.”³ Returning to London, she carried the practice to Caroline, Princess of Wales, later Queen Caroline, wife of George II. Caroline, on hearing Lady Mary’s account, “caused it to be tried” first on prisoners, then on parish orphans, then on her own daughters. “All England, or rather Britain, followed her example.”³

Voltaire treats this pipeline as a triumph. He praises Caroline as “an amiable philosopher seated on a throne, who has improved every opportunity of instruction.”³ He credits Lady Mary Wortley Montagu personally with “at least six thousand children” now indebted “for their lives” to her intervention, and adds that “all the fair of the island” owe her the preservation of their beauty.³ He does not treat as remarkable the fact that a practice was established in Britain by aristocratic decree rather than by scientific demonstration. To Voltaire, aristocratic decree was scientific demonstration. This was how enlightenment traveled: from thrones downward, endorsed by titles.

The circuit remains intact. In 2020 the vaccination program was announced by heads of state, endorsed by celebrities, modeled on live television by presidents and monarchs, and imposed on those with the least ability to refuse first. The mechanism Voltaire describes for 1721 is not a historical curiosity. It is the operating manual.

The first Western trial was on six prisoners at Newgate

Voltaire refers to “four criminals under sentence of death” in a single passing sentence. He notes that Caroline “not only rescued them from the gallows, but, by means of this artificial attack of smallpox, prevented them from having it in the natural way, which they, in all human probability, would have had, and of which they might have died at a more advanced age.”³ Their doubly indebted lives, spared from execution and spared (in theory) from a future disease, appear in the essay as a piece of moral bookkeeping in the queen’s favor.

The historical record is more specific than Voltaire’s phrasing. On 9 August 1721, six prisoners at Newgate, three men and three women, were inoculated under the supervision of Charles Maitland, the surgeon who had performed the procedure on Lady Mary’s son in Constantinople.⁴ Voltaire says four. Contemporary accounts say six. The prisoners were promised royal pardons in exchange for participation. All survived the procedure and were pardoned in September of the same year. One of them, Elizabeth Harrison, was subsequently sent to Hertford to sleep in the bed of a ten-year-old smallpox patient and to nurse him through his illness. This was a further experiment, testing whether the procedure had made her proof against a fresh attack of the disease. She reportedly did not fall ill.⁴

There is no record that any of the six was in a position to refuse. There is no record that informed consent, in any form recognizable to the modern reader, was sought or obtained. The terms of the offer, inoculation or the gallows, are their own answer to that question. Whatever the six understood about what was being inserted into their arms, they understood the alternative.

The Newgate experiment is not incidental to the history of Western vaccination. It is the beginning. The captive population came first. The physicians came next. The royal children came after. The rest of Britain followed by imitation. Every subsequent mass injection program has recapitulated this order.

The prisoners were followed by parish orphans

Voltaire does not mention the second experiment. The historical record does.

After Newgate, and before Caroline’s own children were inoculated, the practice was tested on a further group: children from the St James’s parish charity school, orphans and pauper children with no parents to consent or refuse on their behalf.⁴ The standard figure is five or six. All survived. The Royal Society, satisfied by these results, formally endorsed the practice.

Only then, on 17 April 1722, were the two eldest daughters of the Princess of Wales, Amelia and Caroline, inoculated at St James’s Palace.⁵ Voltaire notes their inoculation as the moment “All England, or rather Britain, followed her example.” He does not mention the prisoners and the orphans who established the safety of the procedure that was tried on the royal children.

The sequence is precise. Prisoners at Newgate: no consent, threat of execution. Orphans at St James’s: no parents, no consent. Royal children: protected by the two prior rounds of human experimentation. Mass practice: following royal example. The chain has four links. Each link reduces the risk carried by the next. The prisoners bore the risk for the orphans, the orphans for the royals, and the royals bore no meaningful risk at all, because two rounds of trials had already occurred by the time their turn came.

Voltaire, describing the same chain, saw benevolence at every link.

The material was decomposing tissue inserted into a wound

Voltaire describes the procedure openly and without discomfort. It appears in the essay’s third paragraph, before any of the philosophical apparatus is deployed. The women of Circassia, he writes, are “accustomed to give their children smallpox, even as early as at six months of age, by making an incision in the arm, and afterward inserting in this incision a pustule carefully taken from the body of some other child.”³

The words are worth reading slowly. An incision. In the arm. Of a healthy child. Six months old. A pustule, decomposing lesion material, carefully removed from the body of a sick child. Inserted into the wound of the healthy child.

Voltaire compares the resulting reaction to bread rising. The pustule “so insinuated produces in the body of the patient the same effect that leaven does in a piece of dough; that is, it ferments in it, and communicates to the mass of blood the qualities with which it is impregnated.”³ He does not appear to notice, or perhaps does not consider it worth noting, that the practice consists of introducing biological material from a diseased body directly into the tissue of a healthy child through a wound. He treats the innovation as mechanical rather than pharmacological, “a trifling matter of pain” in his phrase, offered to spare a child from a worse disorder later.³

The Chinese variation is described in the same untroubled tone. They “take smallpox up the nose in powder, just as we do a pinch of snuff.”³ Same principle, different route. Voltaire finds it “more pleasant” than the incision.

Whatever else the practice was, this is what it was materially. Decomposing tissue introduced into the body of a healthy person through a wound or through the nasal passages. Voltaire’s own description is enough. No modern reframing is required.

The arithmetic was propaganda

Voltaire supplies numbers. The numbers do the work of the argument.

He claims that of every hundred people, at least sixty will fall ill with smallpox. Of those sixty, twenty will die, and twenty more will be disfigured. This yields, in Voltaire’s phrasing, “a fifth part of the human species assuredly killed, or, at least, horribly disfigured.”³ Against this, he sets his claim about inoculation: “Among the vast numbers inoculated in Great Britain, or in Turkey, none are ever known to die, except such as were in a very ill state of health, or given over before.”³

The claim was false when he wrote it. Deaths from inoculation had been documented within months of Newgate. By 1723, James Jurin, the Secretary of the Royal Society, was publishing statistical accounts in the Society’s own Philosophical Transactions that placed the mortality of inoculation itself at roughly one in fifty, or two percent.⁶ Jurin believed the figure still favored the practice against natural smallpox, but his own numbers gave the lie to the claim Voltaire would make ten years later that no one ever died from the procedure. Voltaire wrote a full decade after Jurin’s first report. He would have known.

His figures on natural smallpox are also questionable. A twenty percent mortality rate among those who fell ill was at the upper end of estimates for the period. It also depended heavily on what counted as smallpox, a diagnosis that in the eighteenth century covered a range of eruptive conditions of varying severity. The exact mortality of eighteenth-century smallpox is not knowable in the terms Voltaire uses. Some outbreaks were devastating; others left most of those affected only mildly ill. The averaging into a clean 20-in-60 arithmetic is itself a rhetorical device, not a report from the record.

Voltaire’s numbers were doing what numbers do in propaganda. They were closing an argument in advance of examination.

The protection was never demonstrated

The arithmetic is not the deepest problem. Underneath Voltaire’s numbers sits a claim he treats as established and never proves: that inoculation actually prevented later smallpox in those who received it. If that claim fails, everything else fails with it.

The single empirical demonstration from the founding period was the Elizabeth Harrison test. One inoculated woman was sent to sleep in the bed of a smallpox patient. She did not fall ill. This was treated as proof. What it showed was that one person did not fall ill in one specific circumstance. There was no control group. There was no measurement of how many uninoculated people would have fallen ill under identical exposure. The Royal Society treated an uncontrolled n=1 result as evidence for a mass practice.

The base rates never supported Voltaire’s arithmetic in the first place. In no reliably documented period did smallpox approach his sixty-in-hundred, twenty-in-hundred figures on a population basis. Most children who fell ill recovered. Most who were never inoculated did not die of the disease. If a hundred children were inoculated and ninety-eight of them later did not die of smallpox, that ninety-eight was announced as protection against a natural mortality that no reliable record ever confirmed.

What the practice reliably produced was interpreted circularly. Inserting decomposing tissue into a wound caused a local eruption, fever, and often a systemic illness of variable severity. They called this having had the disease mildly. The claim that followed was that the mild version protects against the severe version. No mechanism was proposed for this that survived scrutiny.

Voltaire’s own carve-out gives the game away. He says none among the inoculated die “except such as were in a very ill state of health, or given over before.”³ The exceptions eat the rule. Any death after inoculation was reclassified as caused by preexisting weakness. Any severe illness in the supposedly protected was called something else. The confirmation architecture was tautological. The practice worked, and when it did not appear to work, the failure was attributed to something other than the practice.

The practice began as slave-trade cosmetics

Voltaire himself notes the Chinese variation, and some later historians place variolation’s deeper origins in India or in African practices predating Circassia. What his essay traces is the practice’s passage into the West, and the pipeline he narrates runs through the Circassian slave trade.

Voltaire, in the third paragraph of his essay, explains where the Circassian custom came from.

He does not soften it. He states it as commercial reality.

The Circassians, he writes, “are poor, but have handsome daughters; which, accordingly, are the principal article of their foreign commerce. It is they who furnish beauties for the seraglios of the grand seignior, the sufi of Persia, and others who are rich enough to purchase and to maintain these precious commodities.”³ The daughters were merchandise. They were sold into the harems of the Ottoman sultan and the Persian shah. Smallpox scarred the face. Scarred faces did not command the same price. A daughter blinded, disfigured, or dead was a loss to the family’s principal income. In modern terms, this was human trafficking of girls into sexual slavery, conducted at scale across the Caucasus, the Ottoman empire, and Persia. The inoculation practice was developed to preserve its inventory.

The whole practice, Voltaire says, was developed to preserve the commercial value of girls raised for sale. He states this as background, as the natural context of the practice, and moves on. The Circassians, he writes, having noticed that a mild childhood exposure appeared to prevent later severe disease, “concluded, that if a child of six months or a year old was to have a mild kind of smallpox, not only would the child certainly survive, but it would get better without bearing any marks of it.”³ The observed effect was cosmetic preservation. The motive was economic. The customer was the harem.

This is the foundational text. Voltaire is unembarrassed by any of it. The Circassian practice, he writes, spread from the harem trade to the Turkish elite: “at this day, there is scarcely a pasha in Constantinople who does not inoculate his children while they are at the breast.”³ Lady Mary observed it there. She brought it to Caroline. Caroline tried it on prisoners. The prisoners survived. The orphans followed. Her daughters followed. Britain followed. The eventual Jesuit missionary, having read Voltaire’s chapter, inoculated the Native children he baptized in America, “so that they are indebted to him not only for this present life, but also for life eternal at the same time; what inestimable gifts for savages!”³

Read forward from the origin, the chain is unbroken. A protocol developed to preserve the market value of enslaved girls in the seventeenth-century Caucasus was carried, by an ambassador’s wife, to the throne of England; tested on the powerless; endorsed by aristocratic example; imposed on colonial subjects by missionaries; and eventually enshrined as the founding technology of Western public health. Voltaire narrates every step and treats each as evidence of enlightened progress.

He is a hostile witness in the strict sense: he did not know he was writing an indictment.

The pulpit and the palace

Voltaire closes his essay with a note on the resistance the practice faced in Britain: the curate who preached against it, the “prejudice” that got hold of the pulpit before “reason” could arrive. He ends on the observation that reason “could not reach it till long after; this is no more than the common progress of the human mind.”³

The confidence was misplaced. In 1898 Alfred Russel Wallace published Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime. Wallace was co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and later a recipient of the Order of Merit, one of the most decorated scientists of the Victorian age. His book analyzed the official mortality record for smallpox across the nineteenth century. He concluded that vaccination had provided none of the protection claimed for it, and that its persistence in law was owed to the political and commercial interests of a medical establishment that had staked its reputation on the practice.⁷ Wallace was not easily dismissed on grounds of competence. He was largely ignored. The reason that Voltaire believed would eventually reach the pulpit did reach it, and was told to be quiet.

The 29 December broadcast comes back to mind. Harris pushed back her sleeve, the nurse leaned in with the syringe, and the thumbs-up followed for the cameras. The circuit had not changed since 1721. The aristocratic imprimatur Voltaire named as decisive in 1733 had, by 2020, been laundered through three centuries of institutional continuity into something readers were expected to accept as science. The costume changes. The circuit does not.

Voltaire wrote to celebrate a princess who cut open six prisoners to test a slave-trade cosmetic protocol on her own children. He mistook the template he was writing for progress.

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References

¹ Sasha Latypova, in conversation with Dr. Andrew Kaufman on The True Health Report. Latypova’s writing on vaccine history and cancer epidemiology appears at Due Diligence and Art, https://sashalatypova.substack.com. The reference to Voltaire’s essay on inoculation arises in the context of Latypova’s essay “175+ Years of Cancer: The Big Picture the Establishment Does Not Want You to See.”

² Voltaire, “Inoculation,” Letter XI in Philosophical Letters (Letters Concerning the English Nation), first published in English in London in 1733; French edition Lettres philosophiques published 1734. Quotations in this essay are drawn from the English translation in The Works of Voltaire, Vol. XIX (Philosophical Letters), Online Library of Liberty edition, pp. 16-19.

³ Voltaire, “Inoculation,” op. cit., pp. 16-19. All direct quotations from Voltaire’s essay in this piece are drawn from these pages.

⁴ Charles Maitland, Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox (London, 1722). The Newgate experiment of 9 August 1721, the numbers and names of the prisoners, and the Hertford follow-up involving Elizabeth Harrison are documented in Maitland’s contemporary account and analyzed in Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957). The subsequent experiment on parish orphans at St James’s is discussed in the same sources.

⁵ On the inoculation of Princesses Amelia and Caroline on 17 April 1722, see Miller (1957), op. cit.; also Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

⁶ James Jurin, “A Letter to the Learned Caleb Cotesworth, M.D., F.R.S., Physician to St. Thomas’s Hospital, Containing a Comparison Between the Danger of the Natural Small Pox, and of That Given by Inoculation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 32, no. 374 (1723). Jurin’s serial statistical reports on inoculation in the 1720s are analyzed in Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁷ Alfred Russel Wallace, Vaccination a Delusion: Its Penal Enforcement a Crime, Proved by the Official Evidence in the Reports of the Royal Commission (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898).

Truth Be Told: I’ve Accepted an Invitation to Speak on The Unvaccinated

On September 17th, I’ll be giving a one-hour presentation titled The Unvaccinated as part of a six-hour livestream called Truth Be Told. This is the first time I have accepted an invitation to an event, and I have been honoured with the opening act. The livestream begins at 12pm EST.

Vaccination is the subject closest to my heart, and this is another opportunity to spread the word. The format will preserve the pen name.

Jamie Andrews (Decentralized Science Projects) and Agent131711 (Dinosaurs) will also be presenting. Jamie’s Virology Control Studies work led to an interview here last year. Agent’s research shaped my essays on vitamin D and dinosaurs. Tickets are here. The code UNBEKOMING is $5 off and applies automatically at that link. Replay available afterwards. Hope you can make it.