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.
Why this wins its question: The Balmis expedition is the whole of the story in almost every English page on this subject, and it ends when the ships arrive. What happened next is the part that decided whether anyone stayed protected, and it is barely told: boards with secretaries who published counts, a priest who kept the fluid at his house on Puán street, ward officers ordered to register the unvaccinated, post horses carrying arm-to-arm material out to frontier forts. This object gives that continuity a printed number from 1808 - 1532 vaccinated in Bogotá in three years, with the year-by-year breakdown - and, on the same footing, the two facts that make the number honest: the fluid was kept alive in the bodies of enslaved men and of foundlings whose mortality before the age of two ran at forty per cent, and the whole apparatus collapsed by 1815 because nobody paid for it.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
A colonial vaccine board published its own numbers, and they survive in print. The Semanario of Bogotá carried in 1808 a "Noticia del número de personas que se han vacunado en esta capital desde 1 de Marzo de 1805, en que por efecto de la bondad del Soberano se dió principio á las primeras vacunaciones, hasta 29 de mayo de 1808, en que se continúan, observándose en el flúido la misma frescura, vigor y actividad que manifestó entonces", published by Miguel de Pombo, lawyer of the audiencia and secretary of the Junta principal de Vacuna. Its table reads 390 vaccinated to 1 March 1806, 542 to 5 March 1807, 600 to 29 May 1808, "Suma total en 3 años" 1532.
The claim the notice makes for itself is about state duty and it names Jenner. The vaccinated are "una nueva generacion de hombres que dentro de pocos años ofrecerán á la patria y al Estado unos brazos robustos y útiles", who without the vaccine might have been counted "en los 40 millones de víctimas que sacrificaba en cada siglo el furor de las viruelas"; the discovery is credited to "el celo filantrópico y á las infatigables observaciones del inmortal Jenner", and the vaccination establishment is called the most worthy of "un rey sabio que reconoce como primera ley del Estado la de conservar sus pueblos". The forty-million figure is the period's rhetoric, not a measurement, and is reported as such.
In the Río de la Plata the fluid arrived by a route the crown had not planned. Di Liscia writes that "the beginning of variolation in the Río de la Plata can be traced back to the arrival of Portuguese businessman Antonio Machado Carvalho, who arrived in early August 1805 aboard a ship with inoculated slaves. He brought the 'true vaccine' delivered by 'two small black men.'" Her earlier study puts it more bluntly: "a Portuguese slaver, for example, in 1805, brought the vaccine to the Rio de la Plata on the arms of enslaved people who had been already vaccinated."
The institution that took it up was the same one that ran the rest of colonial medicine. "During the colonial period, many healthcare responsibilities, such as vaccination, were managed by the Royal Protomedicato", and "the Irish physician Miguel O'Gorman was in charge of the Protomedicato in the Río de la Plata from 1798 until its virtual dissolution in 1822", after which a Medical Tribunal and then a Conservatory of Vaccines took over. The office survived the revolution of 1810 by nine years and the function outlived the office.
Conservation was a personal charge before it was a public building. In 1807 the Protomedicato made the priest Saturnino Segurola responsible for conserving the vaccine, and he "continued administering the vaccine almost privately in his residence on Puán street". In 1813 he published a regulation which "required neighborhood mayors to compile a registry of both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals" - a household-level vaccination register kept by the ward officers of a city at war.
The cost of that continuity was paid by people who could not refuse, and the author says so in terms: "Slaves and minors, especially orphans, were used to maintain and propagate the virus in optimal conditions for inoculations, reflecting a morally reprehensible situation regarding individual rights that were accepted for the benefit of the majority (adults) of the population." The orphans came from the Casa de Niños Expósitos of Buenos Aires, where "infant mortality from various causes, not just smallpox, was much higher than the city average, with a staggering 40% rate between the ages of 0 and 2". This claim belongs beside the vaccination totals, not after them.
Inoculation in the region did not begin with the vaccine, and the earlier practice was also carried out on a subject population. In the Guaraní settlements, Di Liscia records, "deadly smallpox epidemics occurred in 1732, 1733, 1738, and 1764, and the priests inoculated 7,414 indigenous individuals" - variolation, not Jennerian vaccination, and on a scale that has no European parallel of the same decades.
The system failed for money, and quickly. Writing of the years after 1810, Di Liscia states that "five years later, vaccination had been abandoned, and smallpox was spreading again. The reasons given were that those responsible for supplying and distributing the product had forgotten this obligation because they received no funds." A living vaccine has to be paid for every month it is kept, and a government in a war of independence stopped paying.
Nor did the successor states solve it soon. In Argentina vaccination was made compulsory for immigrants only in 1876 by law 817, for schoolchildren in 1880 by law 1420, and for the whole population of Buenos Aires in 1886; and compulsion did not mean coverage - between 1875 and 1901 "2 106 070 plates were distributed to vaccinate more than 4.5 million people", while "the public institutions only registered 323 000 people vaccinated". The colonial boards are not being flattered here by comparison with a later golden age, because there was not one.
What this object is not. It is two well-documented theatres, not a survey: Bogotá is argued from one printed notice of 1808 in a periodical, and Buenos Aires from two studies by the same historian, so a single scholar's reading carries most of the Río de la Plata material. Nothing here establishes how many people were vaccinated across Spanish America, how many of the Bogotá 1532 were indigenous, enslaved or poor, or what the boards did in Lima, Mexico or Manila. The archives that would settle those questions were not reachable from the machine that wrote this.