Article ID: CBB001023052

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

unapi

Few, Martha (Author)


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

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.

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

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

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Authors & Contributors
Eriksen, Anne
Penschow, Jennifer D.
Andrade, Gabriel
Gelati, Giacomo
Serge Boarini
González Espitia, Juan Carlos
Concepts
Smallpox
Medicine
Disease and diseases
Vaccines; vaccination
Inoculation
Public health
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
17th century
20th century, early
20th century
Enlightenment
Places
Europe
Cuba
Americas
India
Lyon (France)
Guatemala
Institutions
Catholic University of Ireland (Dublin)
Royal Belfast Academical Institution
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