The history of science is often taught to us in a very simple form of individual geniuses who changed our understanding of the world forever. But in fact, any practical scientist knows that science as a discipline is based more on communication, collaboration and the slow revealing of knowledge over time. A great example of this is the history of vaccines, which we often associate with Edward Jenner in the 1790s. But the seeds were planted much before that. Inoculation was a very common practice in places like Turkey and Africa before it ever reached England. And the way it reached England was from Lady Mary Montagu, who was the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey in the early 18th century. In one of the letters in here, she talks about being shocked by the experience of seeing people who were being inoculated. And she was particularly interested in this because she herself had suffered from smallpox and almost died of it. Here she says, quote, the smallpox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of en grafting, which is the term they give it. she goes into great detail about how the operation is performed. So she’s spreading the word back in England about something that was actually a common medical process in Turkey. When she got back home, she publicly inoculated her daughter, spread word, the royal family’s children got inoculated. And that LED to all sorts of Debates in the scientific and medical community, which then formed the context for Edward Jenner’s vaccine in the 1790s.