An 18th-century aristocrat sprints from her family estate in a nightgown to elope, sneaks into the women-only bathhouses of the Ottoman Empire, wages a public feud with Alexander Pope, and, almost in passing, introduces a life-saving medical procedure to Western medicine 75 years before the vaccine. Every word of it is true. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born in 1689 into a world that wanted her quiet and ornamental, refused the terms completely.

This episode follows the girl who secretly taught herself Latin eight hours a day in her father's library, the coldly strategic elopement that read more like a contract negotiation than a romance, and the discovery she made in a Constantinople bathhouse: Turkish women safely inoculating against smallpox while Europe's experts scoffed. It ends with the fight to get variolation accepted in England, the  ...