A Pox On Your House? Please Call! / Chicken pox parties may be back in vogue
Indeed, although the idea of deliberately exposing children to virulent diseases at parties may seem like a trendy, New Age kind of approach to disease prevention, it harkens back at least 350 years. Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1689-1762), wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, discovered in her travels that the scourge of smallpox, which had been so devastating in western Europe, had been largely contained in present-day Turkey due to the practice of deliberately infecting children with small quantities of the smallpox virus.
