Perhaps I shall be pardoned for a slight digression here. I laid some emphasis on the backward condition of the art of surgery in my native town, but I do not mean thereby that Turkey has been altogether behindhand in the art of medicine. In some particulars she has even led the way. For instance, she may claim the discovery of inoculation as a defence against smallpox, and it is worth while recalling the fact that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced the treatment into England from Turkey many years before Jenner made his first experiment. As Lady Mary saw it, inoculation was performed with lymph taken from human beings, but according to the _Tarikhi Jevdet_ (vol. ii., p. 341, press mark Turk. 9, British Museum Library), inoculation was also performed in a manner suggestive of calf-lymph. A Turkoman of the pastoral tribes in Asia Minor was paying a visit to Constantinople, and he saw the children being inoculated with other children's lymph. He said that in his own country the lymph was taken from the fingers of those who milked the cows. The book, moreover, states that Lady Mary heard of the Turkoman's statement, though she does not mention this in her letter.[1]
The Circassians and some of the tribes of Caucasus are said to have been acquainted with the uses of inoculation in olden days. They were chiefly slave-dealers, and they had to take great care of their young girl-captives, more especially as regarded any sort of disfigurement which would destroy their good looks, and consequently their value. Of the early history of the sickness little is known, but it is a well-established fact that the symptoms were first clearly diagnosed by the ancient Arab physician, Rhazes, whose name is well known to Orientalists and students of medical history. His book is entitled _Kitab-ul-Jederee Vel-Hassabeh_, the translation of which is _Treatise of Smallpox and Measles_. This work was translated into English from a Latin version by T. Stark early in the eighteenth century.
The business-like European manner of investing money is not known among our people. Those who do not know what to do with their spare money, and who fear it may be stolen, or kindly taken charge of by the officials of the paternal Sultan, hide their cash by burying it in corners of their houses or fields. But we did not hide the five hundred pounds belonging to my mother. Someone suggested to us that we should buy mohair goats, of which the hair, cut every spring, would yield us an annual income. This was a little after the Russo-Turkish War, and in the consequent depression of trade even the silky-haired, valuable Angora goat was to be cheaply bought We purchased three hundred of these animals. But misfortunes never come alone. In a year's time a disease broke out among the greater part of the animals in our province, and almost all our goats died. My mother, in her simple faith, attributed this to kismet, and consoled herself and us accordingly.