Keeping the vaccine alive: vaccine boards, conservators and human reservoirs in Spanish America, 1805-1815

The royal expedition delivered cowpox to America in 1804; the harder problem was keeping a living fluid alive afterwards, year on year, in cities without refrigeration. Two theatres show how it was done and what it cost - Santa Fé de Bogotá, whose vaccine board published a count of 1532 vaccinations in three years, and Buenos Aires, where a priest kept the fluid at his own house and the arms it passed through were those of enslaved men and foundling children.