Villalba, Epidemiología española (Madrid, 1803)
A Spanish army surgeon's chronological history of every plague, contagion, epidemic and epizootic recorded in Spain from the arrival of the Carthaginians to 1801, printed at Madrid in two volumes. It is the book that put the word "epidemiología" on a title page in a modern sense — and it names the older Sardinian tract that had used it first. Its American pages record both the smallpox Spain carried to Mexico and the yellow fever the Indies sent back to Cádiz.
Why this wins its question: English-language histories of epidemiology reach the word through John Snow and William Farr and mention Villalba, when they mention him at all, as a curiosity in a footnote about the term's first appearance — usually crediting him with coining it. The evidence that settles the question is on the pages themselves: the 1803 title page and its scope, the dedication that states the book's forward-looking purpose and credits Cardinal Gastaldi with the idea, and page 133, where Villalba's own bibliography records the Sardinian "Epidemiologia" of two centuries earlier and so refutes the coinage claim made on his behalf. Set beside those, this entry puts the book's American pages on the record in both directions — the smallpox Spain carried to Mexico with a number attached, and the fever the book argues was carried back from America to Cádiz — and the patriotic premise printed on its first page of introduction that a reader should weigh against the second conclusion. Nothing here is reported from a catalogue entry; every quotation is from a page opened in the 1803 sheets.
Key takeaways
- Villalba's Epidemiología española (Madrid, 1802; reissued 1803) is the work through which the word "epidemiología" entered modern usage — and it cites, on page 133, the 1598 Sardinian tract that used the word first.
- Its stated purpose is prospective: a chronological register of past outbreaks offered as a guide to decisions in outbreaks still to come.
- The book prints the Spanish origin of the American smallpox catastrophe in its own text, with a figure of six hundred thousand Indian dead taken at second hand.
- It concludes that the Cádiz and Seville epidemic of 1800 was exotic, probably transplanted from America, and traces its spread from infected towns to healthy neighbouring ones.
- It preserves Juan José de Castelbondo's observation at Cartagena de Indias in 1730 that the fever spared everyone who had already set foot in the Indies.
- The same first page that opens the book declares plague foreign to Spanish soil, which is a thesis stated before the evidence and a reason to hold the American-origin conclusion at less than full confidence.
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 book is a Madrid imprint of 1803 in two volumes. The title page of tomo I reads "Epidemiología española, ó historia cronológica de las pestes, contagios, epidemias y epizootias que han acaecido en España desde la venida de los cartagineses hasta el año 1801", with the further promise of "noticia de algunas otras enfermedades de esta especie que han sufrido los españoles en otros reynos, y de los autores nacionales que han escrito sobre esta materia, así en la península como fuera de ella". The author is given as "el licenciado don Joaquin de Villalba, profesor de cirugía-médica, primer ayudante de cirujano mayor del exército, académico de la Real Academia Médica Matritense, catedrático de hyppofisiologia en la Real Escuela Veterinaria", graduated at Zaragoza. It was printed "en la Imprenta de D. Fermin Villalpando, 1803"; tomo II carries its own title page with the same imprint and year.
The work first appeared in Madrid in 1802 and was reissued the following year, which is the edition read here; its author was a surgeon and the librarian of the Colegio de Cirugía de San Carlos, and the book was meant as one part of a larger history of medical knowledge in Spain that he never brought to completion. This dating and framing come from the modern facsimile edition's own description rather than from the 1803 sheets, and are reported at that strength.
The purpose is stated in the dedication and it is prospective, not antiquarian: the history of the plagues, contagions and epizootics of Spain is "dirigida á enseñar con exemplos de lo pasado el sendero recto del acierto en los casos venideros" — directed to teaching, by examples from the past, the straight road to getting it right in cases still to come. A chronological register of outbreaks is being offered as an instrument of future decision.
Villalba does not claim the idea as his own. The same dedication records that "el eminentísimo señor Cardenal Gastaldi, fué el primero que dió una lista cronológica de las pestes que hubo en el mundo", and proposes only that a prince of the Spanish church should now protect a Spanish one. The priority he claims is national, not conceptual.
The claim usually made for the book — that it is the first to carry "epidemiology" in its title — is qualified inside the book itself. In the bibliographical survey at tomo I page 133, among the plague writers of the late sixteenth century, Villalba records "Tiberio Quinecio Angelicio, que escribió la obra siguiente: Epidemiologia, sive tractatus de peste ad regni sardiniae pro regem". The word had been used on a title page more than two centuries earlier, and the man whose book made it current knew it and printed the reference. What is defensible is that Villalba's is the work through which the term entered modern usage, not that he coined it.
The book records the Spanish transmission of smallpox to the Americas, in the entry printed under the year 1492. Smallpox, it says, was unknown to the Indians until it spread from Europe to the East Indies through Dutch commerce "y á la América por un negro esclavo de Pámfilo Narvaez quando este General español pasó á México contra Hernan Cortés su enemigo"; the enslaved man who carried the disease among the inhabitants of Zempoala "les dexó la mortal semilla para perpetua memoria de su infeliz arribo, de suerte que seiscientos mil indios fueron víctimas de este terrible contagio". The figure is Villalba's, taken at second hand from Valcárcel and from Francisco Gil, and the placement of a 1520 event under the year 1492 shows the chronology is thematic at this point; modern estimates of the epidemic's toll vary widely. What the page establishes is that a Spanish state medical writer of 1803 printed the origin of the American smallpox catastrophe as Spanish and put a six-figure number on it.
The American traffic runs the other way as well, and the book follows it with something close to an epidemiological argument. Its treatment of the Cádiz and Seville fever of 1800 concludes "que la enfermedad ha sido exôtica en Cádiz y Sevilla, á donde probablemente se transplantó el miasma contagioso desde la América", that it would perhaps not have propagated had atmospheric changes not predisposed bodies to receive it, and — the operative point — "que de los pueblos infectos pasó sucesivamente á los inmediatos que estaban sanos". The disease is identified with the Typhus Hicterodes of Sauvages and said to differ very little from "la calentura pestilencial amarilla de las Indias occidentales".
One of the observations the book preserves is an acquired-immunity finding made in the Caribbean. Under the epidemic that struck the fleet in September and October 1730, killing more than two thousand two hundred people, Villalba reports that "Don Juan Josef de Castelbondo, médico de dicha armada, y despues de Cartagena de Indias, observó entonces, que esta enfermedad solo acometia á los que no habian estado en Indias, dexando libres á los que antes habian pisado aquel suelo", and cross-refers the reader to the year 1753 for the physician's own printed work. The same pages record that in 1730 and 1731 Cádiz saw an epidemic with two symptoms "nunca vistos en España", jaundiced, livid or black spots and the black vomit that followed them.
The book's framing is patriotic and says so on its first page. The introduction opens: "Del saludable suelo de España rarísima vez brotarian los funestos ramos de la peste, si por nuestro descuido una semilla adventicia no lo alterase y corrompiese de tiempo en tiempo" — plague is foreign to Spanish ground and arrives as adventitious seed. Villalba then ridicules Van Helmont's explanation of Spanish immunity by the pitch-lined wine-skins of the country and proposes the constitution of the climate instead. A reader should weigh the conclusion that the fever of 1800 was transplanted from America against a thesis, stated before the evidence, that epidemic disease in Spain is by nature imported.
The evidence is compiled, not observed. The entries rest on chroniclers, municipal records, earlier physicians and printed treatises, cited in footnotes by author and page — Capmany, Zurita, Escobar, Haller, Nicolás Antonio — and long stretches of both volumes are bibliography rather than epidemiology, cataloguing the Spanish authors who wrote on plague and what each of them held. The register is only as good as the sources it abstracts, and it does not distinguish diseases by any criterion a nineteenth-century nosologist would accept.
A dispute attaches to the book's afterlife. The suspicion put into circulation by Luis Comenge — that the two great nineteenth-century historians of Spanish medicine, Antonio Hernández Morejón and Anastasio Chinchilla, worked from Villalba's unpublished papers — became a commonplace among historians of Spanish medicine, and the introductory study to the modern facsimile sets out to discard it. The dispute is recorded here as unresolved: the counter-argument has not been read in this run, only the edition's statement that it is made.