For years, journalist and researcher Carlos Daguer immersed himself in centuries-old archives, colonial documents and remote records to reconstruct a story that seems like a fable.: how the conflict that occurred in 1802 between the city council and the deputy chief Pedro Mendinueta over the management of smallpox in Santafé de Bogotá spread the world’s first vaccination campaign.
On June 19 of that year, the people of New Granada sent this letter to King Carlos IV in Madrid with their complaints about the deputy. The impact of this conflict forever changed the history of public health…
“We’re in the water cloister, it’s a colonial building that was built in the year 1600 by the San Francisco River. In 1802 it was the equivalent of Corferias during the COVID pandemic, it was a temporary hospital where smallpox patients were received from the epidemic that began in 1801 and which ended in 1803. an epidemic which was the reason why King Charles IV decided to send the first expedition to bring the vaccine to America”, said Daguerre.
The source of the dispute in the capital city of New Granada was that although the deputy commander proposed to change the isolation sites for the sick and thus try to stop the count, the councilors asked that it be to create temporary hospitals and a budget to provide adequate treatment to those who had smallpox. . The panic caused by the smallpox in the people of Santa Fe was hardly natural: the death blows of the last revolution in 1782 filled the life of the capital of New Granada with terror.
The epidemic in 1782 was very bad and left a terrible memory in the people of Bogotá. In Bogotá that had no more than 20 thousand inhabitants, less than 20 thousand inhabitants, 17 thousand would have, he could have killed 7 thousand people at that time, 40 percent of the population population
“What exactly did smallpox do to the body, how did it affect people?” I am asking him. Daguer answers: “Metan was a terrible disease because it deformed not only the skin but also the body of people, there were pimples that came out and which covered almost the whole body and the whole face, that is, Sometimes there were no gaps on the face where there was no pimple. Pus came out of that pimple, but this pus was the pus of the disease; people were often blind, the marks on their faces were very clear from smallpox survivorsthe mortality rate was very high, around three out of every 10 people could die from smallpox. “
Daguer’s research established the controversy of New Granada as the origin of the famous Philanthropic Vaccination Expedition undertaken by the Spanish crown in 1803. The ship María Pita sailed from La Coruña in Spain and arrived in Venezuela in 1804. She then went up to Cuba and Mexico where the journey changes to a ship, the Magallanes, which sails from Acapulco and goes to the other side of the world, crossing the Pacific Ocean. First to the Philippines and China, and then crossing the Indian Ocean and then to the Atlantic Ocean to pass through the island of Saint Helena, very close to Africa. Finally, In 1806 the expedition reached Lisbon and later ended in Madrid.
“Since the vaccine was always degraded in South America when it was carried in a glass, the king said time and time again, since we have failed in these efforts, we will try to organize a trip to cross the Atlantic with orphaned children, because they said they are not going to return home, and this is how they organized the Royal Philanthropy Vaccination Tour in which ‘ 22 orphaned children left La Coruña and every 10 days they were injected with cow pus in a positive way to ensure that the pus would arrive fresh. and in effect. ”, assures the journalist.
Daguer, a man interested in the history of epidemics, immersed himself for three years in the historical archives of Spain, Colombia and Ecuador; revised forgotten manuscripts and He used experts to translate old files. This is how he built his book The Pus of Miracles.
“The vaccine left Spain on November 30, 1803 and arrived at the mouth of the Magdalena on May 14, 1804. And to Santafé de Bogotá in December 1804,” adds the journalist.
On the surface, the novel by the Spanish writer Javier Moro, repeats part of this story from the point of view of Spain, but Daguer focuses on what happened with the epidemic in Colombia. For example, the transfer of the vaccine through 10 children from Cartagena who left La Heroica up the Magdalena to Honda and later arrived in Santafé de Bogotá, imitating the action of the 22 people who received the vaccine originally.
Daguer also described how the authorities of New Granada implemented strategies to deal with the crisis while the miraculous lymph reached the capital.
“The handling of the 1802 rebellion was praised, the authorities congratulated themselves on what they had achieved, this strategy of creating temporary hospitals, of allocating resources to the people, they said that this made it possible for the deaths to be very few. In a city of 30,000 inhabitants, about 330 people died, according to the accounts they gave us. “
One of the most revolutionary measures in public health was that a census was taken for the first time of the population that had not suffered from smallpox. The goal? To know the number of people who were likely to be sick, because it was known that those who suffered the disease were already out of all danger.
“And knowing how many people were susceptible to disease, they could calculate how much it would cost to manage the epidemic, they could calculate how many medicines would be necessary to get them and they would know how much how many residents there were. perhaps suffering from epilepsy. This is the first practice with pictures that is used in this epidemic. “
When the last vaccine arrived on the frozen Santa Fe savannah, in December 1804, smallpox had once again disappeared. In good measure because of how the council and the people of New Granada opposed what happened.
“Although when the vaccine delivery arrived, the epidemic had already died, it was a reason to leave public health institutions of Colombia.. The distribution of vaccination in our public health institutions has a fundamental character; one can say that the ministry of health had a great-great-grandmother’s vaccination board.
On a trip to the past we toured with Carlos Daguer to the main locations of his book in the center of Bogotá. In 1802 there were 195 blocks in the capital, eight neighbourhoods, 31 temples, 13 convents and only one hospital.
We start the tour in the current Santander Park. Under the religious leadership of the Third Order, based in this church, a temporary hospital was created in August 1802 to care for women suffering from smallpox. Of 250 who were hospitalized there, 40 died.
“For the church it was very important to prevent parishioners from paying the tithe, so the church had an aim to save people’s lives, to care for them out of Christian charity , but obviously there was a stated purpose in the documents as well. that smallpox could also reduce the tithes received by the institution,” said Daguer.
Then we went through the Plaza de Bolívar, which two hundred years ago was the Mayor and brought together the main institutions of the Viceroyalty. Where the Bogotá Mayor’s Office is today was the Cabildo and the center’s residence. From there we went down to the church of San Juan de Dios, where the only hospital in the capital, the San Juan de Dios, was working at that time.
One out of every six people who entered left in the first place, the journalist says.
“People came in to suffer, so to speak, with some dignity, and to receive care of some kind, to receive Christian charity; That is why the first hospitals were created by religious orders, they were more, in fact, a place to receive care on the eve of death than to come out alive. “
We ended our tour at the National Archives, where Daguer found the documents that support his book. Together with him we reviewed valuable manuscripts that recorded, for example, the costs of temporary hospitals at the time or the food and clothing they gave to those who had smallpox.
“Here we see a file that contains an account of the costs of the hospital established in Las Aguas for the treatment of smallpox from June 6, 1802. There we see how they change the hospitals that, we see that they carry spoons, that they carry blankets, that they wear petticoats, they wear panties, but also the food they gave to the patients, we find a lot of chocolate, honey, rice, arrack, onion. “That was completely unprecedented in the history of epidemics in the New Kingdom of Granada.”
Despite the great progress in health, Daguer lets out a surprising truth. It was spent on managing the epidemic, which lasted months, almost the same as the cost of the reception given in Santafé to Mendinueta’s successor, Viceroy Antonio Amar y Borbón.
“Although there was a very high investment for the care of the sick, it is still very funny that the total amount of care is very similar to the 5,000 pesos invested to get Viceroy Amar y Bourbon for a year or two.” .
Economist and historian Cristhian Bejarano was another friend that Daguer added to his path. Reviewing the parish registers of the time, Bejarano analyzed more than 16 thousand burials from that time until the peak of smallpox deaths in Santafé de Bogotá. Bejarano says funerals cost a fortune in those times and it was common for dead children to be left in churches.
“They left them lying in the healthy upper part of the churches, so one always finds in the book that the priests write down in times of epidemics: ‘Today they left three little angels in the healthy upper part, the next day six. little angels in the healthy upper part’, without identifying their gender or name.”
In 1558 smallpox reached those lands according to Colombia. From then on the epidemic would reappear every 20 years. Scientific efforts only managed to eradicate this disease in 1979, that is, 408 years after it first devastated Bogotá and caused millions of victims around the world. The last case recorded in Colombia is from 1966.
This book by Carlos Daguer is an attempt to explain an interesting chapter of public health that most of us are not aware of. A trip to the past to learn about the history of miracles.
2024-04-28 22:53:46
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