This is CBS Island the World. I'm John Batchel. Exploring the planet through time and space,

thanks to Matthew Lockwood, his new book Explores a New History, looks at our planet from the point

of view of people who were there, but don't get written up as famous explorers. They did explore.

They explored Europe, some instances. They explored medical science.

We turned to a story I had never heard before, and it connects to the people of the United States.

There was a smallpox pandemic that stretched across the Atlantic, the end of the 18th century.

1772, 74, you've read about how the Adams family risked inoculation of the children

and the ordeal because you get sick right away and then come back.

Smallpox vaccination.

Where did that come from?

Who was Mary Wortley-Montague? And what did she discover, Matthew?

Yes, so Mary Wortley-Montyue is fascinating figure. She's the wife of a British ambassador to Constantinople, the Ottoman court.

And she insists on traveling with him there and traveling in part over land

because she was curious about the worlds she was encountering for the first time. And I think her

story is a really important one when we think about the history of exploration, because exploration

is also always about exchange.

It's about exchange of ideas and information.

And her story is the story of a particular exchange that had really important consequences for the world.

So she arrives in Constantinople, the wife of an ambassador, and is someone who's curious about breaking

down the walls that exist between Europeans and Constantinople and the people, the people.

And one of the things she encounters in attempting to get to know Ottoman women in particular, is this practice of variolation.

So, variolation, as far as we can tell, begins in China in the 16th century,

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