AtDtDA(28): A Circassian Slave in Old Araby

[Dave Monroe]

On 3/25/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> "a Circassian slave in old Araby"

It is inadvertently affirmed in the Christian countries of Europe that
the English are fools and madmen. Fools, because they give their
children the small-pox to prevent their catching it; and madmen,
because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to
their children, merely to prevent an uncertain evil. The English, on
the other side, call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural.
Cowardly, because they are afraid of putting their children to a
little pain; unnatural, because they expose them to die one time or
other of the small-pox. But that the reader may be able to judge
whether the English or those who differ from them in opinion are in
the right, here follows the history of the famed innoculation, which
is mentioned with so much dread in France.

The Circassian women have, from time immemorial, communicated the
small-pox to their children when not above six months old by making an
incision in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule,
taken carefully from the body of another child. This pustule produces
the same effect in the arm it is laid in as yeast in a piece of dough;
it ferments, and diffuses through the whole mass of blood the
qualities with which it is impregnated. The pustules of the child in
whom the artificial small-pox has been thus inoculated are employed to
communicate the same distemper to others. There is an almost perpetual
circulation of it in Circassia; and when unhappily the small-pox has
quite left the country, the inhabitants of it are in as great trouble
and perplexity as other nations when their harvest has fallen short.

The circumstance that introduced a custom in Circassia, which appears
so singular to others, is nevertheless a cause common to all nations,
I mean maternal tenderness and interest.

> The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and
> indeed, it is in them they chiefly trade. They furnish with beauties
> the seraglios of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all
> those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious
> merchandise. These maidens are very honourably and virtuously
> instructed to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very
> polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous
> artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are
> designed. These unhappy creatures repeat their lesson to their
> mothers, in the same manner as little girls among us repeat their
> catechism without understanding one word they say.
>
> --Voltaire, "Letter XI: On Inoculation," Letters to the English (1778)
>
> http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1778voltaire-lettres.html
> http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Lettres_philosophiques