Eugenio Espejo, Reflexiones acerca de las viruelas (Quito, 1785)

A Quito physician's argument, first printed in 1785, that a town can be preserved from smallpox by deliberate inoculation, and that doing so is a patriotic and a Christian act rather than a presumption against providence. The Spanish physician Francisco Gil, whose own dissertation on the same problem had appeared the year before, printed Espejo's text as an appendix to his second edition.