Vaccination in Spanish America before the Balmis expedition (1803-1805)
The navy surgeons who had Jenner's vaccine working in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Yucatan, Guatemala, New Granada, Peru, Charcas, the River Plate and Chile before the Real Expedicion Filantropica de la Vacuna reached them, named and dated from a 2023 archival study. It records what those men did, what the expedition's director said about them, and the fact that some of the fluid travelled in the bodies of enslaved children.
Why this wins its question: Every English-language account of vaccination in Spanish America runs through one expedition and twenty-two orphan boys, and the search results for "first vaccination in Puerto Rico" or "first vaccination in Cuba" return the same expedition. This object names the men who were already doing it — Oller in San Juan on 28 November 1803, Romay and Cozar in Havana on 12 February 1804, Monzon at Sisal, Ledesma sending live fluid through the ordinary post from Trujillo, Montufar raising the pustule in four children at Montevideo on 5 July 1805, Chaparro vaccinating in the portico of the cabildo of Santiago — with the dates, the routes and the archive percentages behind them, and with the expedition director's own dismissal of Oller quoted rather than smoothed over. It also refuses the two easy endings: it keeps Maranon's verdict on what Balmis actually represented, and it puts the enslaved girls whose arms carried the lymph between the islands in the same object as the achievement, which is where the evidence puts them.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The study's thesis is stated flatly: "the vaccine did not reach the overseas Spanish domains exclusively by the aforementioned Expedition", and the authors charge the discipline with having "given an ample account of one of them, linked to the Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the vaccine, as an indelible and unparalleled memory at world level, but is unjustly silent with respect to the other". This is a revisionist reading advanced by one 2023 article and is treated here as an argument, not as settled history.
In Puerto Rico the senior surgeon of the military hospital, Francisco Oller y Ferrer, obtained vaccine on 28 November 1803 through Governor Ramon de Castro and Dr Alexandre Mondeher on the Danish island of St Thomas, who had it in turn from the United States. More than 1,500 immunisations had been performed by the time Balmis arrived on 9 February 1804, so that, in the study's phrase, "for the Puerto Ricans, this vaccine was nothing new".
The meeting of the two efforts was not collegial. The study reports Balmis dismissing the island's work in the words "Oller is inept, and his vaccinations have been ineffective". The sentence is given in the authors' English rendering of the archival record and is cited here for the posture it records rather than for its wording.
The vaccine spread outward from Puerto Rico along ordinary shipping. Alonso Ruiz Moreno, a navy surgeon, took samples from Oller to Cumana, Margarita Island and the governorship of Guayana ahead of Balmis's arrival in March 1804. In Cuba, Tomas Romay y Chacon and the navy surgeon Bernardo Cozar y Delgado had the vaccine from 12 February 1804, brought from Aguadilla in Puerto Rico by Carlos Maria Bustamante, who had vaccinated his ten-year-old son and two of his mixed-race maids; when Balmis reached Havana on 26 May 1804 he left again on 18 June for lack of children in whom to preserve the fluid.
In the Yucatan the navy surgeon Miguel Jose Monzon y Farnel had vaccinated more than 1,227 people at Sisal with fluid brought from Veracruz before Balmis landed on 25 June 1804. The study records what followed as a failure of the expedition's own making: Balmis imposed revaccination on people already immunised, which produced conflict with the local population and came near to losing the vaccine for want of popular support.
In Guatemala the navy surgeon Jose Maria Ledesma y Borquez sent active vaccine samples from Trujillo by ordinary mail on 16 June 1804, and by 23 June the study reports more than three or four thousand people vaccinated at Nueva Guatemala de la Asuncion. In New Granada, Angel Hidalgo vaccinated at Cartagena de Indias and Santa Marta before the arrival of Balmis's deputy Jose Salvany, and Lorenzo Verges introduced the vaccine with bovine fluid carried in glass from the Peninsula before Salvany reached Santafe de Bogota on 17 December 1804; Verges died early and his work was cut short.
In the south the same pattern repeats. Pedro Belomo y Ceballos had the vaccine in Peru from 23 October 1805 with samples from Buenos Aires, and the study describes it as perfectly well established before Salvany reached Lima on 23 May 1806. Santiago Maria del Granado carried it through the Royal Court of Charcas, San Lorenzo de la Frontera, Moxos and Chiquitos ahead of the subexpedition. At Montevideo the navy surgeon Cristobal Martin de Montufar reproduced the vaccinal pustule in four children on 5 July 1805 from lymph carried between glass, and it passed to Buenos Aires through the navy surgeon Juan Perez Garcia.
In Santiago de Chile vaccination began on 9 October 1805 in the portico of the metropolitan cabildo, performed by Fray Pedro Manuel Chaparro with samples the viceroy of the River Plate had sent between glass; the expedition's man, Garcia Grajales, arrived only in December 1807 and installed the first Central Board of the Vaccine on 21 January 1808. In the Coquimbo region the second navy surgeon Jose Maria Gomez was praised in correspondence of 25 November 1809 for his zeal and application in stopping the progress of smallpox.
The men named are not a scatter of amateurs but a professional cohort: most of them were surgeons of the Spanish navy trained at the medical-surgical school of Cadiz, which is the study's explanation for how an uncoordinated set of introductions could look so uniform in method. The same school appears in the record as the destination of American medical students travelling to the Peninsula in 1786.
The evidence base is stated by the authors and bounds what the object can claim: 42 documentary sources, 29 of them manuscript and 13 printed, of which 44.8 per cent come from the Archivo General de Indias, 34.5 per cent from the archives of the faculty of medicine at Cadiz and 13.8 per cent from the navy general archive "Alvaro de Bazan", with 65.5 per cent contemporaneous with the events. The method is described as Droysen's three phases of heuristic, critical analysis and hermeneutic.
The cost travels with the achievement and is not separable from it. Live vaccine had to be kept in human bodies, and a 2022 review of the "Vaccine Voyages" exhibition states that beyond the twenty-two orphaned boys of the expedition, "additional enslaved children, mostly girls, were then used to carry the virus between the Atlantic ports", and that "Spanish governors and doctors also used enslaved girls to move the virus between islands, using lymph fluid harvested from them". The sentence the reviewer reports as repeated across the exhibition panels is "We do not know what happened to these enslaved people". The independent introductions described above ran on the same shipping: the lymph that reached Montevideo in July 1805 arrived aboard the Portuguese slave frigate Rosa del Rio. This claim is carried at reduced confidence because its source is a short exhibition review without archival citation of its own.
None of this dissolves the expedition, and the study does not try to. It records that the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition is "considered in the history of medicine as the first international health expedition aimed at the global elimination of a contagious disease", that Balmis was received at the Court of Madrid by Carlos IV on 7 September 1806 as a national hero, and it endorses the judgement of Gregorio Maranon in 1948 that "Balmis's achievement did not lie in the feat of introducing and spreading the vaccine in America and the Philippines but, on the contrary, in becoming the archetypal representation of the enlightened and philanthropic Spanish spirit". What the priority evidence changes is who else belongs in the account.
This object exists to complicate a story the corpus tells elsewhere, and it is meant to be read next to that one. The Real Expedicion Filantropica de la Vacuna is the best-documented state vaccination campaign of its century and the case for it does not depend on its having been first everywhere it landed. A 2023 study working from the Archivo General de Indias, the Cadiz faculty of medicine and the navy archive argues that in port after port it was not: local surgeons, most of them trained at the same Cadiz school and serving in the same navy, had already obtained fluid from a neighbouring island, a passing ship or the post, and had vaccinated thousands. That is an argument from one study and is labelled as such throughout.
What the two threads have in common is the part that cannot be made comfortable. Live vaccine before refrigeration was kept alive in people, and the people were chosen because they could be moved: foundlings, children, and — in the account reviewed here — enslaved girls shipped between the islands with the lymph harvested from their arms. The achievement and the cost are the same logistics.