After-Orts #6
- the Hallelujah chorus sung by a choir of silent monks -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRhjWdr-LAA
I look forward to 2020 ending, sometime in early 2025.
— Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, quoted at the end of this NYT article:
"What Happened in 2020 Will Not Stay in 2020"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/us/politics/2020-election-over.html
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Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general among 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 smallpox—they make parties for this purpose—and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what vein 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 matter as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after that 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 middle of the forehead, one in each arm, and one 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 ambassador says pleasantly that they take the smallpox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of anyone who has died in it; and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son.
— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing from Turkey in 1718
quoted in Lapham’s Quarterly, Fall 2011