Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms

3 Creole Medical Authority and Peninsular Vaccination Campaigns,1802–1810

78 creole Medical authority and Peninsular Vaccination campaigns, 1802–1810 3 In 1805, a naval surgeon in the port city of Callao, located several miles west of Lima, became the first person in the colony to carry out a new and revolutionary medical procedure that had originated in England. Trained in medicine and surgery and using materials that had recently arrived on a merchant ship from Buenos Aires via Chile, Pedro Belomo successfully transferred smallpox vaccine fluid into the arm of a young boy named Cecilio Cortez.1 In subsequent years, Belomo’s introduction of the vaccine into the body of a colonial subject would be heralded as a tremendous achievement, as a feat enabling authorities to rescue the colony from the ravages of disease, and as a way to increase Peru’s population for the Crown’s benefit. It would also prove polemical, however, generating conflict between peninsular medical officials and Lima’s creole medical elite. Belomo’s achievement was crucial to the work of reform-minded physicians in Lima. By carrying out Peru’s first vaccination against smallpox, he made it possible for local doctors to propagate the vaccine fluid and carry out mass vaccinations among the colony’s subjects for the first time. The vaccine came from cowpox virus and was perishable when stored outside the human body for extended periods. The most efficient way to preserve the smallpox vaccine and practice vaccination was by transferwarren text i-290.4.indd 78 7/23/10 10:42 AM creole Medical authority and Peninsular Vaccination campaigns 79 ring it from person to person, or “arm to arm.” Following Belomo’s lead and drawing on studies from Europe, doctors would drain the pustules of those recently vaccinated and introduce the contents, which contained the vaccine’s active agent, cowpox, into the arms of those not yet exposed. In doing so, they would put an end to an epidemic that had devastated Lima. Although Pedro Belomo was in fact a peninsular Spaniard and a surgeon , following his success with the vaccination, Lima’s creole physicians quickly seized the opportunity to welcome the longtime resident of Lima into their ranks. Anxious to promote the colony’s growing medical expertise and to distance Belomo from his black and mulatto counterparts in surgery, they spoke of him as one of their own, praised his knowledge of medicine, and eventually appointed him to the position of surgeon examiner (protocirujano). Belomo’s success with the smallpox vaccine also made him a much-celebrated hero among the city’s broader creole elite. It led Lima’s bastion of creole political power, the city council or cabildo, to shower him with praise. Cabildo members expressed their gratitude to the surgeon formally, and they thanked God for producing such a “handsome sore” on Cecilio Cortez’s arm.2 In addition, they rewarded Belomo with paid positions and provided Cortez with one hundred pesos per year until he reached the age of twenty-five, to compensate him for successfully propagating the vaccine fluid in his body.3 As a result of these decisions, Belomo became a central protagonist within the larger creole-led medical reform project. Moreover, he seldom expressed any inclination to cling to his identity as a peninsular. At the same time that Belomo succeeded in transferring the smallpox vaccine in Callao, however, in the viceroyalty of New Granada a peninsular surgeon, José Salvany y Lleopart, directed one branch of an official royal expedition to extend the same preventative method to the New World. In 1802 and 1803, Charles IV and his officials received news of an especially destructive smallpox epidemic in Santa Fé de Bogotá that was decimating the population. Officials sent letters pleading for help. Acknowledging that Edward Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine in England raised the possibility of eliminating one of the most destructive diseases in the Americas, the king decided they must take action. In July 1803, he ordered officials and doctors to form a maritime expedition “composed of able specialists committed to the task, who, going to great effort and expense, would take a proportional number of children on the journey, whom they would inoculate progressively, thus preserving through this and other means the vaccine fluid.”4 Upon their arrival in the New World, warren text i-290.4.indd 79 7/23/10 10:42 AM 80 creole Medical authority and Peninsular Vaccination campaigns doctors would then...