IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001023052

Circulating Smallpox Knowledge: Guatemalan Doctors, Maya Indians and Designing Spain's Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, 1780--1803 (2010)

British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 43
Pages: 519--537

Publication Date: 2010
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science”
Language: English

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Smallpox Geographical studies of science Inoculation Mayan civilization Disease and diseases Medicine Medicine, traditional Colonialism Spain, colonies American Indians; Native Americans; First Nations of the Americas 18th century 19th century Spain Guatemala

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.

...More

Included in

Article Raj, Kapil (2010) Introduction. British Journal for the History of Science (p. 513). unapi

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001023052/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Thesis Meyer, Victoria Nicole; (2010)
Divining the Pox: The Controversy over Smallpox Inoculation in Eighteenth-Century France (/isis/citation/CBB001567185/)

Article Mark, Catherine; Rigau-Pérez, José G.; (2009)
The World's First Immunization Campaign: The Spanish Smallpox Vaccine Expedition, 1803--1813 (/isis/citation/CBB000932121/)

Thesis Lopez Denis, Adrian; (2007)
Disease and Society in Colonial Cuba, 1790--1840 (/isis/citation/CBB001561294/)

Article Soumonni, Elisée; (2012)
Disease, Religion and Medicine: Smallpox in Nineteenth-Century Benin (/isis/citation/CBB001420619/)

Book Bala, Poonam; (2009)
Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts (/isis/citation/CBB000950294/)

Book Fields, Sherry; (2008)
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico (/isis/citation/CBB001023338/)

Article Gabriel Andrade; (2020)
The Balmis expedition of 1803 and the debate about the merits of Spanish colonialism (/isis/citation/CBB749930747/)

Article Anne Eriksen; (2016)
Advocating Inoculation in the Eighteenth Century: Exemplarity and Quantification (/isis/citation/CBB673499373/)

Book Martha Few; (2015)
For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (/isis/citation/CBB029842103/)

Article Minsky, Lauren; (2009)
Pursuing Protection from Disease: The Making of Smallpox Prophylactic Practice in Colonial Punjab (/isis/citation/CBB000932125/)

Book Juan Carlos González Espitia; (2019)
Sifilografía: A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World (/isis/citation/CBB593267991/)

Book Boylston, Arthur William; (2012)
Defying Providence: Smallpox and the Forgotten 18th-Century Medical Revolution (/isis/citation/CBB001211555/)

Article Mario Tanga; Giacomo Gelati; (2016)
Quando il pharmacon è la “materia velenosa” da somministrare a chi è ancora sano (/isis/citation/CBB867109848/)

Book Jennifer D. Penschow; (2021)
Battling Smallpox before Vaccination: Inoculation in Eighteenth-Century Germany (/isis/citation/CBB768586402/)

Article Eriksen, Anne; (2013)
Cure or Protection? the Meaning of Smallpox Inoculation, ca. 1750--1775 (/isis/citation/CBB001320601/)

Article Serge Boarini; (2018)
L’inoculation de la petite vérole à Lyon: De la condamnation à l’acceptation (1779-1811) (/isis/citation/CBB229117772/)

Thesis Jones, David Shumway; (2001)
Rationalizing epidemics: Historical accounts of American Indian health disparities (/isis/citation/CBB001562613/)

Book Michael J. Bennett; (2020)
The War Against Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the Global Spread of Vaccination (/isis/citation/CBB765954016/)

Article Riley, James C.; (2010)
Smallpox and American Indians Revisited (/isis/citation/CBB001034272/)

Article Bhattacharya, Sanjoy; Brimnes, Niels; (2009)
Introduction: Simultaneously Global and Local: Reassessing Smallpox Vaccination and Its Spread, 1789--1900 (/isis/citation/CBB000932118/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}