The remains of the Catalan military physician José Salvany y Lleopart (1776? – 1810) rest in the Church of San Francisco in Cochabamba. Suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, and blind in one eye, he arrived in Alto Peru (modern-day Bolivia) in 1807 guarding an invaluable treasure: the smallpox vaccine. During his passage through La Paz, coming from Lima, he informed King Carlos IV that he had managed to vaccinate nearly 200,000 people in that region. But how did this young doctor come to die of exhaustion in Cochabamba?
At the end of the 18th century, smallpox was a lethal disease that claimed 400,000 lives per year in Europe alone. With the expansion of interoceanic routes, the disease spread unintentionally throughout the world—particularly in the overseas territories of the Spanish Crown—wreaking havoc on the indigenous population, who were immunologically defenseless against this virus “imported” from Europe.
Hope arrived in 1796, when English physician Edward Jenner successfully applied the first vaccine in history. The term “vaccine” comes precisely from the cow (vacca in Latin). Based on the observation that those who milked cows and contracted cowpox (milder than the human version) became immune, Jenner inoculated the cowpox virus even into his own son, inducing immunity to human smallpox. From then on, the European population began to be vaccinated, but reaching overseas populations presented a logistical problem: the vaccine remained active for only 12 days, an insufficient time to cross the Atlantic.
It was then that Spanish physician Francisco Javier Balmis had a bold idea: transport the vaccine in a “human container” by successively inoculating 22 orphaned children to keep the vaccine chain alive. Thus, the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition (1803) was born, recognized today by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the first international medical mission. In Balmis, science joined a deep Catholic faith, which led him to conceive his medical work as a true apostolate to save his fellow brothers.
Two other heroes stood out on the corvette María Pita: Deputy Director José Salvany and nurse Isabel Zendal, Rector of the Charity Hospital of A Coruña. A 30-year-old single mother, she was the soul of the mission, caring for the children—including her young son Benito—throughout the hazardous journey. Zendal faithfully accompanied Balmis through the Caribbean, Mexico, and then to the Philippines, before settling permanently in Puebla with her son. In 1950, the WHO declared her the “First nurse on an international mission.” How many Madrid residents know the history behind the name of their city’s “Enfermera Isabel Zendal” Hospital?
In Venezuela, the mission split. While Balmis headed toward the Pacific, Dr. Salvany embarked on a seven-year, 18,000-kilometer odyssey through the Andean territories. He vaccinated more than half a million people in what is now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, passing away in Cochabamba before fulfilling his dream of reaching Buenos Aires to continue vaccinating in those lands.
A note for Mrs. Claudia Sheinbaum and our Vice President Edmand Lara: this human and Christian feat belongs to the virtue of the Spanish Conquest and contrasts drastically with the strategy of other colonial powers. In 1763, under orders from Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the British army distributed smallpox-infected blankets among the Great Lakes Indians, allies of the French in Canada. That was no legend, but a documented act of the first biological warfare in history. While some carried life on the arm of a child, others sowed death by gifting lethal blankets.