Maria Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, Saturday, 13 June 1807.

Attached to the letter below is a letter by John Saffery to Philip Whitaker, dated 12 June 1807. 

Saturday Morng

   It is with indescribable haste that I add a line to the preceding wh ought have gone last night but necessity has no law.  I am still a nurse as Ann is absent & the Children weak & fretful in some degree.  < > rather more of an Invalid than when I wrote last < > conceive this to be the effect of medicine  Philip continues delicate  Jane has a red mouth in consequence of teething I have had dr Saml vaccinated with matter immediately from Jenner but there is no infection nor as yet any appearance of measles either in him or Jane –

   You know by this time that dr little E’s old bonnet never came as was intended so that I cd do nothing effectually in the affair but return the other with complaint  Mrs E–  says it wd shrink she supposes to the proper size but I am aware that I must now add nothing more, than that I am

                                 Most affectionately your’s

                                             M G Saffery

Our Servts wish to hear from home

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 236 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.A.16.(b.), Angus Library. Address: Mr P. Whitaker | Bratton Farm | nr Westbury.  No postmark. Since the last letter, MGS has given birth in February 1807 to another son, Samuel (d. 1858). References above include Edward Jenner (1749-1823), a Gloucestershire physician, who discovered the first effective smallpox vaccine, initially made public in An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, a Disease known by the Name of Cow Pox (1798), in which Jenner also introduced the first use of the word ‘virus’.