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Circulating smallpox knowledge: Guatemalan doctors, Maya Indians and designing Spain's smallpox vaccination expedition, 1780–1803

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2010

MARTHA FEW
MARTHA FEW
Affiliation:
Department of History, Social Sciences 215, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. Email: mfew@u.arizona.edu.
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Abstract

Drawing on the rich but mostly overlooked history of Guatemala's anti-smallpox campaigns in the 1780s and 1790s, this paper interweaves an analysis of the contribution of colonial medical knowledges and practical experiences with the construction and implementation of imperial science. The history of the anti-smallpox campaigns is traced from the introduction of inoculation in Guatemala in 1780 to the eve of the Spanish Crown-sponsored Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition in 1803. The paper first analyses the development of what Guatemalan medical physician José Flores called his ‘local method’ of inoculation, tailored to material and cultural conditions of highland Maya communities, and based on his more than twenty years of experience in anti-smallpox campaigns among multiethnic populations in Guatemala. Then the paper probes the accompanying transformations in discourses about health through the anti-smallpox campaigns as they became explicitly linked to new discourses of moral responsibility towards indigenous peoples. With the launch of the Spanish Vaccination Expedition in 1803, anti-smallpox efforts bridged the New World, Europe and Asia, and circulated on a global scale via the enactment of imperial Spanish health policy informed, in no small part, by New World and specifically colonial Guatemalan experiences with inoculation in multiethnic cities and highland Maya towns.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 4: Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science , December 2010 , pp. 519 - 537
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2010

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References

1 This expedition is sometimes identified in the literature as the Balmis Expedition (Expedición de Balmis), named after its head, Francisco Javier de Balmis.

2 For conceptualizations of ‘circulation’ and the historiography of its use in analysing scientific, physical, intellectual and economic connections in the early modern world, see Kapil Raj's introduction to this special issue.

3 In late eighteenth- and early ninteenth-century colonial Latin America, the word inoculación (inoculation) could refer to both inoculation with human-derived smallpox matter and to inoculation with cowpox after the development of the Jenner vaccine in 1796. Vacuna (‘vaccine’, ‘vaccination’; from the Latin vacca, ‘cow’) referred specifically to the use of the cowpox virus. Because I will discuss both types of strategy against smallpox, to avoid confusion I will use ‘inoculation’ in this work to refer to the use of human smallpox matter, and ‘vaccination’ to refer to the use of cowpox. There is a huge comparative literature on smallpox inoculation and vaccination in colonial settings. See, for example, for colonial America, Fenn, Elizabeth, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782, New York: Hill & Wang, 2001Google Scholar; for colonial Mexico and Guatemala see Smith, Michael M., ‘The “Real Expedición Marítima de la Vacuna” in New Spain and Guatemala’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1974) 64, pp. 5–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for colonial India see Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993Google Scholar; for colonial Mauritius see Vaughan, Megan, ‘Slavery, smallpox and revolution: 1792 in Ile de France (Mauritius)’, Social History of Medicine (2000) 13, pp. 411–428CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Please also see the contributions to the recent special issue ‘Reassessing smallpox vaccination’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2009) 83.

4 Smith, op. cit. (3), p. 10.

5 Rigau-Pérez, José G., ‘Smallpox epidemics in Puerto Rico during the pre-vaccine era (1518–1803)’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1982) 37, pp. 423–438CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 433.

6 This epidemic has been analysed as a continent-wide phenomenon by Fenn, op. cit. (3).

7 Smith, op. cit. (3), p. 10.

8 It seems that in Chile, inoculation was introduced much earlier on, when friars began using the procedure during a smallpox epidemic in the 1760s. Adam Warren, personal communication, 11 August 2007.

9 José Flores was born in Ciudad Real, Chiapas. He attended the Universidad de San Carlos, where he received his medical degrees, including the doctorate, in 1780.

10 In comparison, inoculation was introduced in Puerto Rico in 1792. See Rigau-Pérez, op. cit. (5), p. 433.

11 Much of this demographic research has yet to be done to catalogue exact numbers of inoculations conducted in the Audiencia of Guatemala during the 1795–1796 epidemic, in part because the document base is uneven. George W. Lovell has done the most extensive and thorough demographic work for these epidemics for the Cuchumatán region. See especially his Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821, 3rd edn, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.

12 See Lanning, John Tate, The Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos Guatemala, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956Google Scholar; and Durán, Carlos Martínez, Las ciencias médicas en Guatemala, 3rd edn, Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1964Google Scholar.

13 Lanning, op. cit. (12), p. 244; Martínez Durán, op. cit. (12), pp. 328–329.

14 I take up this issue in detail in my book manuscript tentatively titled All of Humanity: Colonial Guatemala and New World Medical Cultures before the Smallpox Vaccine.

15 Lutz, Christopher, Santiago de Guatemala: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004, p. 169Google Scholar.

16 Archivo General de Centro América (subsequently AGCA), A1.4.7-4026-31001 (1780), unpaginated.

17 AGCA, A1.4.7-4026-31001 (1780), unpaginated. It is unclear just when the main hospital in Nueva Guatemala, Hospital San Juan de Dios, better know as the Hospital Real, was built and completed in the new capital city. José Aznar López, in El Doctor don José de Flores: Una vida al servicio de la ciencia, Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1960, argues that the hospital was completed in 1779, and Flores took charge from 1779 to 1781 (p. 22). Martínez Durán, op. cit. (12), p. 361, asserts that Flores did not join the hospital staff until 1781.

18 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31001 (1780), unpaginated.

19 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31001 (1780), unpaginated.

20 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31001 (1780), unpaginated.

21 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-30999 (1780), unpaginated.

22 AGCA A1.4-49-241247 (1806), p. 3. This is a ‘merits and services’ report for Caravajal written at the end of his career, where he petitions the government based on his service to the community to receive a retirement pension. While Caravajal does not include the exact date of his inoculations in Petapa, given the other dated information around which this information is embedded, I judge this to be the 1780 epidemic.

23 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31004 (5 septiembre 1780), unpaginated.

24 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31004 (5 septiembre 1780), unpaginated. This stands in contrast to Greg Grandin's findings that identified discourses of the urban poor as illness vectors during the 1830s cholera epidemic in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. See Grandin's important work The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

25 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31004 (5 septiembre 1780), unpaginated.

26 AGCA A1.4.7-4026-31004 (5 septiembre 1780), unpaginated.

27 Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas que refiere M. de la Condaminé en su celebre memoria, sobre dicha inoculación. Leída en la Asemblea pública de la Academia Real de las Ciencias. Traducida del idoma francés al castellano por D. Manuel Gonzáles de Batres, Nueva Guatemala: A. Sánchez Cubillas, 1780. This includes a section dated Nueva Guatemala, 22 agosto 1780, that describes ‘the local method of inoculation first developed by José Flores’ on p. 5.

28 It is unclear from the surviving sources that I have been able to locate exactly how many people were inoculated.

29 Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, op. cit. (27).

30 Flores, José, Instrucción sobre el modo de practicar la inoculación de las viruelas, y el método para curar esta enfermedad acomodado a la naturaleza y modo de vivir los Indios del reyno de Guatemala, Nueva Guatemala: Ignacio Beteta, 1793, p. 3Google Scholar.

31 Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, op. cit. (27), p. 5.

32 Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, op. cit. (27), p. 4. Servants, slaves and children frequently served as medical test subjects in colonial Guatemala. This will be explored further in my forthcoming book.

33 Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, op. cit. (27), p. 4.

34 Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, op. cit. (27), p. 5.

35 AGCA A1-2802-24619 (agosto y septiembre 1780), p. 2.

36 AGCA A1-2802-24619 (agosto y septiembre 1780), p. 2.

37 AGCA A1-2802-24619 (agosto y septiembre 1780), 2v.

38 AGCA A1-2802-24619 (agosto y septiembre 1780), 7v.

39 Archivo General de Indias (subsequently AGI), Indiferente General 1551 (21 junio 1793), ‘El Doctor Don Josef Flores, Título de Primer Protomédico de la Ciudad y Reino de Guatemala’, unpaginated.

40 I have not yet been able to locate either the 1785 or the 1794 real cédula on inoculation, but it is referred to in many documents, including AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’.

41 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 3.

42 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 1.

43 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 1. While Guatemala was not technically a ‘kingdom’, but instead an Audiencia, part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, nevertheless officials sometimes used the term in official correspondence.

44 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 4.

45 Lovell, op. cit. (11), p. 154.

46 Lovell, op. cit. (11), p. 156.

47 Lovell, op. cit. (11), p. 157. Lovell thinks inoculations did not occur in the Cuchumatán region at this time, but he notes that Francisco Asturias, in Historia de la medicina en Guatemala, Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1958, disagrees. The issue remains unresolved.

48 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 2.

49 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 2.

50 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 5.

51 AGCA A1.1-16-624 (1794), ‘Sobre viruelas’, f. 5–5v.

52 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 5.

53 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 3.

54 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 5.

55 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 5. The original reads, ‘los Indios pueden facilmente sobstituir sus puntas afiliadas de Chayes con que se acostumbran sangrar’. I have interpreted chay (pl. chayes) as ‘obsidian’ here.

56 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 3.

57 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 3.

58 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 3.

59 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 3.

60 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 4.

61 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 4.

62 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 7.

63 Flores, op. cit. (30), p. 7.

64 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams and Pocoman (Popoti) who live near the forests of the wild Lacandons in this Colony of Guatemala’ (1798), tr. L. Feldman, Caduceus (1991) 7, pp. 28–29.

65 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 28.

66 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 28.

67 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 29.

68 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 29.

69 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 29.

70 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 29.

71 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 29.

72 For an examination of the response of the Cherokees to smallpox in the 1830s that focuses on indigenous strategies to combat this epidemic disease, see Kelton, Paul, ‘Avoiding the smallpox spirits: colonial epidemics and southeastern Indian survival’, Ethnohistory (2004) 51, pp. 45–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 ‘Method of inoculating for smallpox among the savage Mams’, op. cit. (64), p. 29.

74 AGCA A1-389-8102 (1795-1796), f. 7v.

75 Letter excerpt quoted in Moreno, A. Ruiz, Introducción de la vacuna en América (Expedición de Balmis), Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1947, p. 18Google Scholar. Ruiz Moreno notes that Francisco Requena came up with the idea to spread the vaccine to the Americas, and that José Flores came up with the first plan to do so (p. 20).

76 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803.

77 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 324v.

78 Flores's humanitarian vision and the role that he believed medicine could play is related to broader debates about Creole nationalism and patriotic epistemology that scholars such as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have argued characterized late colonial intellectual debates in New Spain. Some similarities can be seen between Cañizares's conceptualization of ‘patriotic epistemology’ and Flores's construction of humanitarian justifications for anti-smallpox campaigns, including a central role for Creoles as contributors to intellectual debates in New Spain, and the engagement of New World intellectuals in transatlantic Enlightenment debates about historiography and epistemology. I take up in more detail the issue of similarities, as well as differences, in my book manuscript All of Humanity. See Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, How to Write a History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001Google Scholar, especially Chapter 4, ‘The making of a “patriotic epistemology”’.

79 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 330v.

80 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 330v.

81 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 330v. It is unclear from the source just what exactly these experiments with sheep involved.

82 All the quotes and information in this paragraph come from AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 331.

83 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 332.

84 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 332.

85 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 332.

86 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 331.

87 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 332.

88 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 332.

89 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, ff. 332–332v.

90 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 327.

91 AGI, Indiferente General 1558H. Carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (28 febrero 1803), f. 331.

92 AGI, Indiferente General 1558. ‘Expediente sobre la introducción de la vacuna en América. 1802–1813’. Transcribed in Moreno, Introducción de la vacuna en América, p. 171.

93 Lanning, op. cit. (12), p. 245.