The development of an effective vaccine against Covid-19 has reached the attention of the entire world. Several countries approved the vaccine and started with their application schedules to ensure protection among their citizens.
The history of vaccination is a fascinating field of study inside the history of medicine. In this sense, I’ve studied the smallpox vaccine in the former viceroyalty of New Spain (predecessor of today’s Mexico) around 1816–1820, specifically the first application commissions.
The First Vaccine
After several experiments, Edward Jenner discovered and successfully applied the smallpox vaccine by the end of the 18th century. Jenner captured his results about the vaccine in a book titled An inquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccine. Soon this work was translated into French and Spanish, which permitted its diffusion out of Britain.
Around 1803, Charles IV supported his royal doctor, Francisco Bialmis, to start a crusade against smallpox all around the Spanish Empire (mission known as the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition). Unfortunately, this first expedition only succeeded in the spread of the vaccine but achieved little immunization results.
Nevertheless, the vaccine remained in several parts of the Spanish Empire. One was Veracruz, the main harbor of the old viceroyalty of New Spain, and still now the most important in Mexico.
Veracruz and the Vaccine
The Mexican independence war occurred between 1810–1821. This war was a real civil conflict that changed the old viceroyalty’s internal and external trade routes, incomes, and social dynamics. But it also unleashed a series of epidemics in the territory: measles, typhus, and smallpox.
As a content strategy, in 1816, the authorities of Veracruz designed a vaccination plan to protect its population against smallpox, especially the newborns. This plan consisted of the settlement of a permanent commission formed by experts in the vaccine method. The commission was an itinerant one, so it had to move around the city to reach most of the population. In other words, the plan consisted of bringing the vaccine to the people, not wait for them.
The way to proceed was through parish records to identify all the newborns in the city. With these records, the authorities tried to find all those children and immunize them to prevent the smallpox infection (highly lethal for infants).
The extraction of the vaccine was the biggest problem. Because the original vaccine is a fluid extracted from cowpox in those days was arduous to find. Nevertheless, the Veracruz authorities requested the vaccine from Mexico city, which eventually arrived with an expert doctor and some children.
The easiest method to preserve the smallpox vaccine was employing people’s reactions. A week after the application, people developed an ulcer, probe of the successful immunization. This ulcer was full of fluid, the same that serves as a vaccine. Thus, the only thing to do was wait for the ulcer in the first vaccinated people, gather the fluid, and use it for new vaccinations.
This example is just one among many others that happened in the early 19th century. For Mexican historiography, there’s so much remaining work about these early vaccination commissions, their social relevance, and importance as a starting point of a culture of prevention.
