Dr. Francisco De Balmis and His Mission of Mercy
Other cites talk of his initial trip to the New World. Clever? Yes. Ethical? I really don’t think so, unless every orphan volunteered to be a carrier.
In weak defense of Dr. Balmis, he was likely the person most responsible for the eradication of smallpox. He definitely had a “needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few” outlook.
Of, surely. I don’t deny it. I just wanted to point out that the Vikings really were present long enough to be able to do damage. They’re treated so cursorily in most histories that you sort of getr the feeling that they just zxipped y for the weekend. But some of them evidently wanted to stay in for the long haul. Circumstances were against them, though.
They were infected with cowpox, not smallpox. Being infected with cowpox gives you immunity to smallpox, but cowpox is not lethal except in rare cases.
Was the Amazon basin disease-free until the europeans came? today, insects in that area harbor diseases like Dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, leishamaniasis, and many others. yet, the early explorers noted the large numbers of native inhabitants, with settlements all along the river. Something did change for the worse.
Here’s an interesting article on it.
The jungles and rain forests weren’t as extensive as they are today due to slash and burn agriculture. After European diseases wiped out most of the locals, the vegetation reclaimed it’s old territory.
While respecting the education and the work of Ana Maria Rodriguez, she is a children’s science writer. Sadly, many tales geared towards children in modern publications must have happy endings, regardless of true outcome. The article you cite is an extract from a Highlights for Children article. I take the closure of the article with a grain of salt. People do survive cowpox, but I seriously doubt that the young orphans were willing participants, and while I would like to believe all were taken in and educated on the crown’s dime, I’m too skeptical.
ralph124c, a quick bit of research on malaria and leishamaniasis indicate that both have roots outside of the New World, and were likely transported here.
In the context of cowpox, ratherr than smallpox, I much less troubled by the story–both ethically and historically–(and have since found a lot of the information corroborated by searching on Balmis).
For one thing, the use of cowpox explains why they did not simply create the vaccine from smallpox victims in the Americas and Philipines: cowpox, a children’s disease, would have been much less likely to be prevalent in the Americas since the number of children on any voyage would have been unable to carry the strain over naturally, going through toadspittle’s “six week quarantine,” unlike smallpox that would periodically have an entire ship’s crew (or even fleet’s crews) as incubators.
In Mexico, it may have been native hemorrhagic fever following drought that wiped out the population. Europeans had a lifestyle that spared them from the epidemic.