History

Smallpox Vaccine
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas in 1492, they brought with them many viruses that the indigenous people had never dealt with before. Smallpox was the most deadly of these.  Mortality with smallpox in Europe was 15 but in the colonies it was 50. In 10 years, the Mexican population was decreased from 20 million to 2 million. Smallpox is also believed to spread throughout Latin America after expeditions of Spanish to those continents.  This paper will discuss the use of the smallpox vaccine as described in the Real Expedicion Maritime de la Vacuna or The Royal Vaccine Expedition.

King Carlos IV in 1802 got communication that people were dying in all of the New World acquisitions from Smallpox. He christened the Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine in which he put in charge a physician by the name of Francisco Zavier de Balmis to vaccinate the public. The expedition set sail  bearing a full complement of medical personnel and 22 children with their mothers and nurses who had been inoculated from arm to arm throughout the voyage to keep the virus alive. Two were inoculated each week using fluid from the vesicles from the prior two.  This voyage vaccinated tens of thousands of people (Bosch, 2004) in what is today Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chili, Mexico and the Philippines.

The New World (American Continent) had never seen such diseases as the smallpox virus. There were many infected quickly on the arrival of peoples from Europe where smallpox had been rampant for some time.  It only took breathing in the virus particles of a sneeze or cough to spread the disease from person to person and in that day fundamentals of respiratory spread of disease was not known.  People suddenly had fevers, body aches, headaches and chills and then broke out with a flame red rash that was raised and blistered (wcienceclarified.com, 2009). Those few that survived had scars and some were blinded, but most cases ended in death and spread quickly through a population of peoples that had no resistance at all.

When Herman Cortes invaded Tenochtitlan, the same thing happened. The Aztec army had actually defeated Cortes and when they left behind a dead infected soldiers body the siege of the smallpox began.  Within a short time there were many dying of smallpox, in fact, one fourth of  the population of the city died. In many cases whole families died. When everyone in one house died, they pulled down the house around them and burned everything. The disease continued to spread throughout Mexico, helping the Spaniards defeat the Inca Empire as well (wscienceclarified.com). This was followed by outbreaks in the colonies, and Brazil.  The disease wiped out thousands of Indians in Brazil and continued North to the indigenous tribes there.

The scene was one of terror everywhere. The disease got worse when fall and winter approached as people were closer to each other. The death rate went up and there was no stopping the disease except for those few that became immune to it. The ravages according to one priest were appalling.  Families abandoned each other and throughout the countryside, there were deaths that left bodies, infected bodies (sciencelarified.com).

This is the scene that the  Royal Vaccine Expedition came upon. The New Worlds would probably not have been captured and conquered if it had not been for smallpox. However, once the American Continent belonged to the peoples of Europe, there were significant reasons to keep the people there healthy and working.  When King Charles IV found that all of this was happening, his decision was financial.  He could not afford to have all of these peoples dying as he needed them to work to build a New World and now they were citizens of these European Countries so they had to be cared for. Hence the expedition.

The expedition itself was very difficult and took many years, in which many people died before they were served with the vaccine. Keeping the vaccine alive as was noted before was quite difficult but there were other issues, even more difficult.  All of these colonies were remote and for these humans that were serving on the expedition, very uncivilized.  Just getting from one area to another was quite difficult and then the job was quite large.

In conclusion, smallpox probably won many of the colonies for Britain and Spain as there was no resistance to a new disease that spread so rapidly.  Without King Charles IV and his decision, it is difficult to know what might have happened.  As it is millions died. It is certainly not the end of the history of smallpox itself but is the first history known of philantropic use of time and resources for peoples on another continent.