Admiral Lord Nelson and vaccinations

The links for Nelson and Emma Hamilton are to pages at the National Portrait Gallery.   The link to the National Maritime Museum is to its Research Guide, with biography and details of sources held at the Museum.

Horatio, Admiral Lord Nelson came up in conversations when I was growing up.  Not because he fought the French (!), or because he had an affair (tut, tut), but because he was from Norfolk, as my Dad was, and as my maternal grandmother was.    Dad left Norfolk when he was 8 or 9, for the Fens, but always felt very much a Norfolkman.   Nanny Shiplee had left as a toddler, but only got as far as Suffolk.

So I was interested to read the Guardian's report of a hitherto unknown letter in the archives of the National Maritime Museum, in a collection they had acquired in 1946.    It just goes to show that you never know what you might have in your archive.    And although archives are not libraries, perhaps it is a clue that you never know what is in your library collection, perhaps particularly if you have collections of rare or older books.    In relation to decolonising your library and helping academics to decolonise their teaching, perhaps your library already has material that will be useful.    That's a subject for another post.

Back to Nelson.   Nelson was the father of a baby girl, with Emma Hamilton, his mistress, and the letter is to her recording his advice that their daughter should get the new smallpox vaccine.

The article records that he knew there might be a slight reaction, and that he was leaving it up to Emma Hamilton to decide what to do.

It records the letter as saying "Yesterday, the subject turned on the cow-pox. A gentleman declared that his child was inoculated with the cow-pox; and afterwards remained in a house where a child has the small-pox the natural way, and did not catch it. Therefore, here was a full trial with the cow-pox".   

According to a curator of the National Maritime Museum, Nelson may have hear that Nelson would have heard about this new development (Jenner's work was done in 1798, the letter written in 1801) at the Captain's table from the ship's physician.     How did the physician know of it?  How was new scientific knowledge transmitted in the late 1700s?  That's a subject for another post too.