Opinion
Francisco Martelo
22 Nov 2023. Updated at 05:00 a.m.
Over the years, things happen and continue to happen. That is why history scholars should better understand the present and future. But time is a physical quantity. A brilliant physicist, Albert Einstein, wrote a month before his death: “The distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” But for us, those of us who are overcoming limitations, it is good that we know how to place and size this illusion appropriately.
This year marks the bicentennial of the death of Edward Jenner, discoverer of the vaccine smallpox. The Royal Academy of Medicine of Galicia, with the help of the Concello da Coruña, the National Academy of Medicine, the CSAI Foundation, the Balmis Chair of the University of Alicante and the private collection of the historian Carlos González Guitián, has recalled, through an exhibition at our headquarters, to those who fought to defeat a viral disease, smallpox, known as “the biggest killer in history”, causing epidemics capable of killing millions of people each year, in much of the world, until which was eradicated in 1980.
You will remember that the vaccine is a discovery by an English country doctor who realized that a milking girl who had cowpox lesions on her hands did not get sick from human smallpox, which was fatal and caused by a different virus.
For us, the significance of the spread of the vaccine to the Spanish overseas territories in America and the Philippines, and to Macao and Canton, on the Asian coast, by an expedition that left A Coruña in 1803, led by a doctor, is exciting. from Alicante, Francisco Balmis, but with local means and characters: the corvette María Pita, owned and captained by A Coruña and prepared and manned, with great dedication, by characters from A Coruña.
In the immunization of our people, A Coruña played a leading role. The first to vaccinate in Galicia was the municipal doctor Antonio Posse Roybanesand eminent doctors settled here, such as Pérez Portales, one of the founders of the Economic Kitchen and minister of the First Republic, and the doctor of the poor, Doctor Rodríguezthe first to establish vaccination points.
The absurdity already existed, two centuries ago, with the presence of anti-vaccines. Referring to the origin of the agent that was inoculated, they reached the absurdity, drawing the vaccinated men with horns and replacing the women’s breasts with cow udders.
They know the most emotional thing well. The feat of “the children of the lathe” cared for by Isabel Zendal and that, vaccinated arm to arm, every ten days, they allowed the vaccine to arrive in America. It is good to remember that the suffering of our people marked the success of the first transcontinental public health campaign in the world. Helping to imagine them is helping to love them.
Filed under:Vaccination
2023-11-22 04:01:10
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