“Couldn’t it be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, use all the stratagems at our disposal to reduce them”. Jeffery Amherst, Commander in Chief of the Army of the Britain in North America, he communicates with Colonel Henry Bouquet. The letter is dated July 7, 1763. In May, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa ethnic group had forged an alliance of Native American tribes to resist British rule in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley region. Bouquet, a Swiss mercenary heading towards Fort Pitt besieged by the natives, responded on the 13th: “I will try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets that may fall into their hands, taking care, however, not to infect myself”. Amherst answers on July 16: “You will do well to try inoculate the Indians by means of blanketsas well as trying any other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race”.
In the days prior to this correspondence, English officers had anticipated the stratagems suggested by Amherst. Ford Pitt’s account books for the month of June reflect a payment to Levy, Trent and Company for the purchase of two blankets and a handkerchief. The invoice states that the garments have been purchased to transmit smallpox to the Indians (“were taken from people in the hospital to convey the smallpox to the indians”). Payment is authorized by Captain Simeon Ecuyer, commanding officer of the garrison, certifying that they are “for the aforesaid uses”. They handed over the blankets to Chiefs Heart Turtle and Mamaltee, who had come to parley. In his journal, the merchant W. Trent noted: “June 24. We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital. I hope it has the desired effect.”.
He desired effect it would be confirmed after more than two centuries. The Civilian Biodefense Working Group, created in the United States to develop recommendations in the case of the use of smallpox as a biological weapon, issued a Consensus Report in 1999 (JAMA, June 9, 1999-Vol 281). The document states that “epidemics occurred that killed more than 50% of many affected tribes.”
Forty years after those events, another soldier, this time Spanish, brought smallpox to the Indian tribes. To heal. On April 11, 1804, the Royal Philanthropic Expedition arrived in Veracruz with the smallpox vaccine. “At the request of the Commander General of the Internal Provinces, Nemesio Salcedo, on May 21 a vaccine expedition arrived in Chihuahua, from where it was transmitted to all of Nueva Vizcaya, and from there to New Mexico, where both the children and the children were vaccinated. of Spaniards as of all the sedentary Indian tribes and those of the nomads who accepted, such as the Navajo Apaches and the Comanches. In little more than four years, the vaccine had freed all the Indian tribes related to the Spanish from smallpox.“. This is how Mariano Alonso Baquer describes it, in his Doctoral Thesis Spaniards, Apaches and Comanches. Publications of the Ministry of Defense. Madrid. 2016.
biological weapon vs. public health. execrable race vs. human dignity. Progressivism vs Black Legend.
“The indigenous could not get sick or die in the eyes of Spain like any other animal”. The Hospital Real de Naturales, the first dedicated exclusively to the attention of the natives of New Spain, was ordered to be built in 1553 by the future Felipe II, then prince. Referring to this institution, the Mexican historian Josefina Muriel points out that it was neither unique nor exclusive to Mexico City, but part of a policy of the Spanish Crown. Policy whose origin is in the testament —October 1504— of the Catholic Queen: “that they do not consent or give rise to the Indians, neighbors and inhabitants of the Indies and the Mainland, receiving any injury to their persons or property, rather, on the contrary, that they be well and fairly treated, and if they have received any injury that they remedy it and provide” and in the Laws of Burgos of 1512.
The life of the Indian had the inestimable value of every human being and as such deserved that their problems be remedied according to their dignity. For this reason, adds Dr. Muriel: “Indian hospitals were not workshops where the machine of the body was repaired, but places where, with all the respect they deserved, they were cured of their illnesses. Comforted and helped at the time of their death.”
The Hospital of San Andres. In 1779 there was already an IFEMA and a Zendal Hospital. With the same purpose, with the same urgency and equally effective. Around August 20 of that year, a terrible smallpox epidemic began in Mexico City that affected more than 44,000 people, causing the death of nearly 10,000. Given the saturation of the hospitals, the Archbishop of the city took on the task of organizing a makeshift hospital in the building of the former San Andrés school. It was enabled to function with a little more than 300 beds and was attended by priests, doctors, surgeons and employees who helped care for the sick.
Serve these precedents to help understand the essence of a procedure. The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition was not an isolated event; his deed places us before “one of the events that most eloquently proclaims the Spanish character that by itself would be enough to immortalize those who projected it and knew how to carry it out”, would write the Colombian historian Gabriel Giraldo Jaramillo.
The uniqueness of the Expedition lies in its quick gestation, organized and financed by the Crown and in its philanthropic purpose because it is motivated by love for the human race and the search for benefit for the entire population of the Kingdom. A universal company that toured Hispanic America, reached the Philippines, the Portuguese Macao and the Chinese province of Canton. It was a medical and logistical success that is financed, deployed and brought to a successful conclusion by a single country. It will not be repeated.
“Spain has never been an intellectual wasteland. What it has been, and still is today, is a fertile seedbed of complexes” states the historian and novelist Carlos Aitor Yuste. Consequence of the Enlightenment movement of the last decades of the 18th century, the scientific environment was very broad. The Spanish Enlightenment and reformism did not stop with the death of Carlos III. Luis Miguel Enciso reminded us: the modernization impulse progressed with Carlos IV. As has been said, the Vaccine Expedition is not the work of a moment. It is forging before the need to face the continuous epidemics that ravage America and also Spain. “They were clear about the enemy: smallpox; but how to fight against it?” historian Susana M. Ramírez wonders.
It is “precious discovery of the vaccine has excited the paternal request of the king to propagate it in his Indian domains…“
Will continue…
2023-08-05 05:23:25
#Royal #Philanthropic #Vaccine #Expedition #Part #Libertad #Digital
