I am sure
will make you wish yourself here. The small-pox, so fatal, and so
general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of
_ingrafting_, which is the term they give it. There is a set of old
women who make it their business to perform the operation every autumn,
in the month of September, when the great heat is abated. People send to
one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the
small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met
(commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a
nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks
what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you
offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a
common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon
the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a
hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins. The
Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the midde of
the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast, to mark the sign of the
cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little
scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who choose
to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed. The
children or young patients play together all the rest of the day, and
are in perfect health to the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize
them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. They have
very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark; and
in eight days' time they are as well as before their illness. Where they
are wounded, there remain running sores during the distemper, which I
don't doubt is a great relief to it. Every year thousands undergo this
operation; and the French embassador says pleasantly, that they take the
small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other
countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it; and you
may believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of this experiment,
since I intend to try it on my dear little son.

"I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into
fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our
doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I
thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their
revenue for the good of