The Tradition is based on a moment Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described in her Turkish Embassy Letters, written during her time in the Ottoman Empire in the early 1700s. She witnessed mothers gathering to have their children inoculated against smallpox. What stood out to Montagu—and what stays with me—is the calm. The ease of it. The trust in each other and in the process.

When she returned to England, Montagu advocated for the same practice, she even convincing the Princess of Wales to have her own children inoculated. But as that knowledge crossed borders, much of its original context retains? What gets kept? What gets erased?