Voltaire on Vaccination

Portrait of Voltaire, by Nicolas de Largillière. Public Domain.

I’d like to think that Voltaire would be shocked to learn that the merits of vaccination remain up for debate, or rather are up for debate once again, nearly three centuries after he wrote extolling the practice.

From 1726 to 1729, the great Enlightenment Philosophe lived in England. Drawing on experiences from these years, in 1733 he published a volume of essays now known as Letters on the English or Letters on the English Nation. Letters, because each essay was written as though a letter addressed to his fellow French. Covering a wide range of topics from Westminster parliamentarianism to Isaac Newton to Alexander Pope, the Letters generally presented the British in a favorable light in contrast to the French. They were, in a way, well-intentioned propaganda to goad the French into catching up with their rivals across the Channel wherever, in Voltaire’s view, they had fallen behind.

And in Letter XI, Voltaire addressed the practice of inoculation or vaccination. In his telling, Lady Wortley Montague, wife of an ambassador to the Sublime Porte of Ottoman Turkey, brought knowledge of smallpox inoculation back with her to Britain, where the practice was now widespread.

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