23-05-2025
What links our Hertford house and Catherine the Great
Port Hill House in Hertford looks like a standard 17th-century farmhouse, with its symmetrical façade, red-brick chimneys, gabled roof and casement windows. Its backstory, however, is rather more intriguing.
In 1762, Thomas Dimsdale, who was born in Essex in 1712, moved into the seven-bedroom property in the parish of Bengeo, a mile from the centre of Hertford. Dimsdale was a doctor and pioneer of the smallpox vaccine. He used Port Hill House as a base to administer vaccinations against the contagious disease — indeed, it became known locally as Inoculation House.
A year after he moved in, Dimsdale built a small house at the bottom of his garden, known as Pest House, which was purpose-built to inoculate against smallpox. It is now called the Old
