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Keith Moore looks at the fascinating life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writer, traveller and champion of the practice of smallpox inoculation.

Professor Anita Guerrini looks at how some eighteenth-century parents decided to subject their children to the risk of smallpox inoculation in the belief that they were acting in their best interests, whether for reasons of dynasty or affection or both.

We hear from a PhD student at New York University about her project ‘Smallpox and Slavery: Morbidity, Medical Intervention, and Enslaved People's Lives in the Greater Caribbean’.

Keith Moore takes a look at the secret love messages hidden in Victorian flower bouquets, and the pioneering iris cultivation work of Royal Society Secretary Sir Michael Foster.

When inoculation against smallpox was introduced to Britain from the Middle East in the early 1720s, members of the Royal Society found themselves on the wrong side of both conventional wisdom and contemporary piety.