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Hey, it's Tracy. Have you ever driven past an old worn down house and wondered, what would Chip and Joanna do? Well, you don't have to wonder because they got a new show. I know it's called Fixer Upper. Welcome home on the new discovery. Plus streaming service. Chip and Joanna are doing what they do best, giving their clients dream homes that were all super jealous of Buck your watch party now and don't miss fixer upper. Welcome home.

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Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson, and I'm Holly Frailing.

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This is part two of our episode on the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, which was Spain's effort to deliver the smallpox vaccine to its colonies and the Americas and the Caribbean and to implement widespread vaccine programs in those colonies. Once the vaccine had been introduced, this expedition involved a human chain of boys from Foundling Homes and Charity Hospitals who acted as living hosts for this vaccine. Last time we covered the basics of smallpox and how the vaccine made its way to other parts of the world and sort of the the set up for Spain embarking on this.

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Today, we are going to talk about the expedition itself, which was authorized by Royal Charter on June 28th, 1883. And as we noted in part one, the method of vaccinating people for smallpox in the early 19th century was a little gruesome. And most of that detail is in the earlier episode. But like you just got to refer back to it in talking about this. So just note, it will be in this episode as well.

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Although Guatemalan doctor José Flores had advised the Council of the Andes on how to approach this expedition, the person who was actually tasked with carrying it out was expedition director Francisco Javier Doubleness Berengar. Balmes was a physician and Army surgeon who had been born in 1753. He had been named honorary surgeon of the Chamber of King Carlos, the Fourth of Spain, and he had gone on earlier voyages to the Americas to study and collect medicinal plants. So he already had some experience at sea and some familiarity with some of their destinations.

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Balmes was also experienced at administering vaccines. He had been one of the foremost vaccinators in Madrid. He had also translated French physician Jacques Louis Mauro de la Saaz historical and practical treatise on the vaccine into Spanish. And in addition to carrying the vaccine to the Americas, this voyage would also carry Spanish language copies of this book to distribute to health authorities. While they were there, the expedition's goals were to deliver the vaccine to the Spanish colonies, to train local personnel, to administer the vaccine, preserve the lymph and keep the program going over time, and to establish a vaccine board at each stop that would keep records about who had been vaccinated.

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Boluses team for the expedition included Assistant Director José Salvini, along with other surgeons, nurses and practitioners. The only woman aboard was Isabel D and E Gomez, who was the rectories of the Casada Expositor or the Foundling House in La Coruna, Spain. Her name is presented and spelled multiple different ways in records of the day. So there's some fuzziness there. She was the person who was ultimately responsible for the care of twenty two boys between the ages of three and nine, four of them from the foundling house that she was the rectories of, and the rest of them from a charity hospital in LA Koruna.

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One of these boys was Benito Velez, who Isabelle had adopted. Here are the names of the other twenty whose names we actually know along with their ages. When the voyage arrived in Mexico, Juan Francisco and Francisco Antonio, age nine, Andres Niya, age eight, the Center for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Candido and her unmowed Maria age seven, Clemente Domingo NaOH, Jose Manuel Maria and her sinco age six. Francisco, Florencio and Juan Antonio, age five.

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And Pasquale and Martin Thomas Metatarsal. Jose Jorge, Nicholas de la Dolores Manuel Maria José and Vincent de Mala Saleh Evelio, all of whom were age three.

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As far as we know, all of these boys had either been orphaned or abandoned by their birth parents. And the way these foundling houses and charity hospitals worked in Spain was that abandoned or orphaned infants would be brought to them. And after they'd been processed, they would be placed with a wet nurse in the community who would be paid a small stipend for her work. Older children were sometimes placed with foster families, but often they lived in poverty. For the children selected for this voyage, though, King Carlos the fourth promised special protection and an education at the government's expense once they arrived in Mexico as well as employment once they were old enough to work.

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So in terms of what they were promised when they were starting out, it was going to be a long sea voyage, followed by a life that was supposed to be better than what they were experiencing in Spain originally. This voyage had. And planned for a larger ship, but it ultimately took place aboard a Corvette called the Maria Pizza under the command of Pedro del Barco, a Corvette was faster than a frigate, but its smaller size naturally presented some challenges over the course of the voyage.

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The boys were going to be vaccinated in pairs every nine or 10 days just in case one of the vaccines didn't take. But this also meant that there would always be two boys on board with an itchy cowpox blister who were living and playing with 20 other boys in very confined quarters. Since anything from scratching to rolling over in your sleep could damage the blister and roughhousing could potentially lead a child to be infected with the cowpox by accident. Isabel does. And Darla had to keep a careful watch on these kids at all times.

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This sounds like the worst assignment on Earth to me, but praised her for doing it.

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Bomas immunized the first two boys in the chain using limp from people he had previously immunized in Spain and then the Maria Peeter set sail on November 30th, 1883. They stopped first in the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa to distribute the vaccine there. And then from there, they sailed for Puerto Rico, where they arrived on February 9th. For this transatlantic crossing was difficult as any transatlantic crossing was likely to be at this point by the time they got to Puerto Rico.

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Many of the children had developed scurvy and one of them had actually died from it. And this is the one child whose name was not recorded when they got to Mexico. So we don't know what his name was.

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Bomas expected to be welcomed in Puerto Rico with excitement and relief. As we noted in part one, the monarch had sent instructions to all of the Spanish colonies to expect the expedition and to prepare for its arrival. But to Obama's surprise, the vaccine had already been introduced to Puerto Rico. So like other parts of the Spanish empire, Puerto Rico had been trying to control a smallpox outbreak. And military surgeon Francisco Oja heard that the vaccine had already been introduced to the nearby island of St.

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Thomas, which at the time was part of the Danish West Indies. There are several possible ways that the vaccine got to St. Thomas. This is one of the many rabbit holes I went down that I alluded to in part one that kept this from being just a single one part episode. St. Thomas had been under British control in 1881, in 1882, and at that point Britain had started vaccinating its sailors. The Danish Royal Institute for Vaccination had also sent vaccine samples to the Danish West Indies in 1882.

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And John Johnston, who was a physician, had brought the vaccine from continental North America to the island of St. Croix in 1883. It likely spread to other Caribbean islands. From there, I mean, a lot of these islands are close enough together that regardless of who controlled it in terms of colonies, people went among them all the time, regardless of which of these was the source of vaccine in St. Thomas, when all you heard about its existence there, he asked them to send samples.

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The first ones he got had no effect when he tried to use them. But his second attempt worked, even though Governor Raymond DeCastro knew that the expedition was on its way. He thought that the situation in Puerto Rico was too dire to wait around for it. So he instructed all year to start distributing the vaccine widely. However, the governor did insist that his administration do everything they could to make sure the expedition's time in Puerto Rico went smoothly. To avoid ruffling any feathers for having taken this initiative did not work at all.

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Bomas took the existing vaccine program in Puerto Rico really badly. A lot of colonial accounts about this expedition really described him as being arrogant and stubborn. This included writing off local health authorities as ignorant and inexperienced, even if they had already conceived and implemented an entire vaccination program on their own before he got there in Puerto Rico. This led to a prolonged dispute in which Bomas tried to publicly undermine what Ogier had done and claim that the vaccine that year was using was ineffective since all year had already vaccinated more than 1500 people at this point.

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This was a problem also in the window between when the vaccine was introduced to Puerto Rico and when Bomas arrived, people had been so excited about vaccines that children literally vaccinated each other as a game. So some of Obama's concerns about efficacy were probably pretty well-founded. So Bomas pointed out a couple of cases in which someone who all year had vaccinated later developed smallpox or developed a cowpox sore after being revaccinated by someone from the expedition. It is likely this really happened because things are not 100 percent effective.

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All year, on the other hand, noted that these were outliers and that the vast majority of people who were revaccinated after the expedition arrived had no reaction to that vaccine at all. So their earlier vaccine had presumably been effective. Both the governor and all year lengthy correspondence back to Spain describing a lot of hostility and arrogance on Obama's part. Overall, as you have just heard, this first step in the Americas did not go well for the expedition. They spent four weeks in Puerto Rico and although they administered vaccines, they did not set up a vaccine board to keep standardized records for the program.

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Then they faced a prolonged wait for favorable winds before they could set sail again. And it took so long that they had to seek out additional unvaccinated children to bring on board with them to keep that chain going, even then, by the time they finally made landfall again in Venezuela, they had no unvaccinated children remaining on board and only one cowpox or that was ready to produce vaccine. The expedition nearly failed at this point, something Balmes squarely blamed entirely on Puerto Rico.

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However, the chain was not broken at this point. Obama's team was able to vaccinate 28 children in Puerto Cabello Venezuela before they moved on. We'll talk about where the expedition went from there after a quick sponsor break.

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The royal philanthropic vaccine expedition hoped to vaccinate as many people as possible establishing tracking at record keeping procedures that would allow vaccination programs to continue in Spain's colonies long into the future after the expedition was over. So to that end, they vaccinated people, most often children at every city where they stopped. Often people from outlying villages would bring a child or children to have them vaccinated and then return to continue vaccinations. And the place they had come from nine or 10 days later, or a few expedition members would carry the vaccine to a more outlying community at various points.

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They also tried vaccinating cows, hoping to establish a natural reservoir of cowpox in the Americas for the future use. This did not work, though cows.

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However, after they made multiple stops in Venezuela, it quickly became clear that all of this was really just too big of a job for one team. So Bomas split the expedition in half with him directing one team and José Silvani directing the other. Salvationist team traveled south farther into the continent of South America, while Bomas set sail again, this time bound for Cuba. Each had Venezuelan boys to act as vaccine hosts, and the boys who had originally set sail from Spain all remained with Balmes.

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Although those two boys are the ones most often mentioned in the context of this expedition, local children also worked as vaccine carriers after the expedition arrived in the Americas. Sometimes they were recruited from local families and then returned later on, and sometimes they were enslaved.

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So team had the more perilous journey after the expedition split. The South American landscape is highly varied and often extremely treacherous, and a lot of their route went through mountains and rainforests as they vaccinated people for smallpox. They faced tropical illnesses themselves. They started out following the Magdalena River, but their ship was wrecked in what's now Colombia. Not long after they set sail, they were sheltered by the local indigenous people whose Albeniz team vaccinated as they salvaged their ship and tried to get ready to go again.

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They got to Cartagena, which was then known as Cartagena, the Indians. On May 24th, 1884, after vaccinating at least 2000 people, they again split into two groups, each heading in a different direction through Colombia before rendezvousing as Santa Fe de Bogota. Salhani became seriously ill during this expedition, contracting tuberculosis and losing his vision in one eye, which might have been a result of the tuberculosis or it could have been some other infection.

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It's a little unclear. One of Southernness major stumbling blocks happened when they got to Lima, Peru. It turned out that the vaccine had already made its way to Lima, thanks to the viceroy of Buenos Aires. And although this was not the first time that the expedition reached a place only to find that the vaccine was already there, it was the first time that local authorities just did not want to adopt the expedition's procedures for administration and tracking at all vaccinations had become a for profit business in Lima, and local doctors didn't want to lose a potential source of their income.

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The expedition's procedures were only adopted after a new viceroy in Lima supported them. Silvana's leg of the expedition went on for seven years, moving through and sailing around South America before returning to Spain. Savani did not make the return voyage home, though he died in Bolivia in 1810 to return to Bournemouth and the other half of the expedition.

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He vaccinated roughly 12000 people in Venezuela before departing for Cuba, taking four enslaved boys with him to act as vaccine hosts. And once he got there, it turned out once again that the vaccine had already been introduced. Medical authorities in Cuba had been trying to get the vaccine, but their international efforts had all failed. For example, vials of lymph that were sent from Philadelphia were, unsurprisingly, not effective any more by the time they got to Cuba. But then, in 1884, a woman named Dona Maria Bustamente left Puerto Rico bound for Cuba.

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The day after her son and two maids had been vaccinated. Their vaccine sites were ready to be propagated shortly after. Their arrival was just sort of a coincidence that she wound up in Cuba with ready to harvest vaccine as the Cuban authorities were trying to do that.

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Dr. Tomas Romney each home use the lymph to start his own vaccination campaign. So by the time Bomas arrived, thousands of people had already been vaccinated, many of Romney's recip. It's where enslaved Africans who did not have the freedom to refuse it did not go quite as poorly as the expedition's visit to Puerto Rico had, Obama seems to have approached the situation in Cuba with like less overt hostility to the local authorities. This may have been because Remate took the step of demonstrating that his vaccines had been effective by very elating his own sons, who he had vaccinated himself.

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They had no reaction to this exposure to smallpox. Bomas did implement the expedition standardized process for establishing a vaccine board and for keeping records in Cuba, something he had not actually done back in Puerto Rico.

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After leaving Cuba, Bomas went to Mexico, arriving in Veracruz and finding unexpectedly that there was no one waiting to be vaccinated because once again, a vaccination program had already been established before he got there. The island to Mindo or Governing Council had implemented a huge program, complete with registration and tracking and sending vaccine delegations to outlying areas. Balmes was once again at risk of breaking his vaccine chain, but 10 men were conscripted from the garrison regiment to act as hosts.

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These existing vaccine programs, made by this time in Mexico, particularly challenging. He did make arrangements for the boys who had traveled from Spain. They were to be housed in Mexico City. They were placed in the care of the bishop and they started out living at a charitable institution that actually wasn't that much different from what they had left in Spain. They were, though, given academic and religious instruction while they were there. But most or possibly all of them were eventually adopted, mostly by teachers, merchants and doctors.

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But when it came to administering vaccines, Bomas had a lot of trouble finding people who had not been vaccinated yet in Mexico City. He almost lost his source again. But then the mayor brought in about 20 indigenous children and their mothers who were described as needing, quote, much persuasion. In Obama's words, quote, Some admitted that it was right, but that they could not pay. And every single one went to the apothecary, demanding an antidote against the venom that had just been introduced into the arm of her child.

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Yeah, a lot of Baumann's expedition staff does not seem to have taken that lesson to heart that that José Flores had talked about of like don't traumatize people. Why you're doing this.

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They seem to have taken too much. Heavier and more aggressive hand, a lot of time later on, some children from a foundling home that the expedition had vaccinated became ill. And while this illness was initially blamed on Bomas vaccine, a board of doctors was convened and he was cleared from all suspicion. On top of all these challenges, Obama himself was very ill. He had developed dysentery and what he believed was yellow fever. En route from Cuba to Mexico, Balmes continued westward through Mexico.

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In Oaxaca, he established vaccine boards and a plan for vaccinating the indigenous communities situated outside the city. Once he reached the western coast of Mexico, he procured a ship to continue on to the Philippines. Meanwhile, on May 16th, 18 for the first smallpox vaccine was administered in Guatemala, using a vaccine that had been brought from Havana.

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Bomas faced a series of delays when he was trying to leave Mexico. The ship that he was supposed to board was full, and he and the expedition were denied passage rather than waiting for another vessel are really waiting longer for another vessel. He traveled overland Acapulco, setting sail from there in February of 05. Aboard the Magennis, he had a new group of twenty five children on board. Most of them were children from Mexico whose parents were compensated for their participation.

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These children were were to be returned to Mexico after this leg of the expedition was over. They were once again in the care of Isabel Diseased Gomez, who remained on board even though her contract had only been for the trip to Mexico. Conditions on the Maggiano's were much worse than they had been on the way to the Americas from Spain, though they were very overcrowded, the ship was generally pretty filthy, was a situation where he he traveled to another port of departure and got a different ship because he didn't want to wait as long as he would have had to otherwise.

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But their accommodations were not great.

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And again, two dozen kids crammed into that. Yes. With two of them at a time, having a cowpox sore that has to be carefully monitored. Obama's team vaccinated an estimated 20000 people in the Philippines and established a vaccine board before continuing on to Macao, which is part of China today. But at that point, it was a Portuguese colony. Since this was a short trip, he needed only three children to carry the vaccine from Macao. They traveled to other parts of China.

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Authorities in Canton, which was controlled by the Spanish Royal Philippine Company, refused to cooperate with the expedition. So Balmes instead took the vaccine to the British East India Company. They rounded Africa and stopped at the British island of St. Helena on the way back to Spain, where they arrived in July of eighty six.

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Having circumnavigated the globe after this expedition, Bomas was appointed Spain's inspector general of the vaccine sometime around eight or 18 09. During the Peninsular War, French forces sacked his house in Madrid. I was probably when his personal journals that detailed this expedition were lost. His personality seems to have been unchanged during this time. He expressed repeated frustrations that he was not getting enough correspondence from Salvati about his progress, which was still ongoing through South America. At this point, his frustrations were in spite of the fact that warfare was slowing down the mail from South America back to Europe.

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He also accused somebody of being intentionally slow in all of this, even though he was covering an enormous amount of difficult terrain during these years of the expedition.

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Pomus sounds real crabby. In 1899, Bomas returned to Mexico to evaluate the situation, check in on vaccine boards, re-establish lymph supplies where they had been lost, and try to find a local source of cowpox if the human to human chain should break again. He was still there when the Mexican War of Independence started. He got back to Spain in 1813. He was King Fernando, the seventh chamber surgeon. In an 1816, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Medicine.

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Balmes died in Madrid on February 12th, 1819, at the age of 65.

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We will talk about the impact and the legacy of this expedition after another quick sponsor break. If you have a dog or a cat, the good news for your pet is that veterinary care is getting more and more advanced. The bad news is that can often mean that budgeting for unexpected injuries and illnesses can be difficult when your pet is sick. Only one thing matters getting them the care they need. True Pinyon helps plan for your pets lifelong health needs by protecting you from the unexpected with medical insurance for cats and dogs.

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In a way, the royal philanthropic vaccine expedition is one giant contradiction.

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Smallpox only existed in the Americas because Europeans introduced it there, either through their own bodies or through the bodies of enslaved Africans who had no choice in all of this.

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And this effort to control smallpox was only possible because Spain had already developed such a massive colonial administrative state with methods of communication and payment and organization all ready to go. So this expedition essentially approached a serious life or death problem by building on the source of that problem. It used a bureaucracy that had exploited and subjugated and in some cases forcibly converted indigenous peoples to then offer them the vaccine to an illness that they had introduced. Also, as we noted in part one, although King Carlos the fourth had some humanitarian goals with this expedition, parts of it also rested on exploitation.

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In some places, enslavers tried to protect their investments and productivity by seeking out vaccines for their enslaved workforce, who had no autonomy over their own bodies and did not have the freedom to consent to this vaccine. And on the enslavers part, this wasn't just about productivity. It was also about racism and the racist idea that people of African descent were dirty or we're breeding disease over time. This idea spread to free people who were living in poverty as well, and mass vaccination campaigns targeted poor people by force.

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Many, many aspects of the royal philanthropic vaccine expedition would just not hold up today in terms of everything from medical ethics to vaccine safety to general human rights issues. Just focusing on those children who acted as carriers. There were sixty two of them known to have participated during the course of the expedition. Four of them died as a result of their involvement. We didn't specifically say before the break, but those children that were supposed to be returned to Mexico were returned to Mexico.

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The fact that their parents had been compensated to send them on a voyage where they would act as human hosts for a vaccine. I mean, that's not a thing that would probably be done today, fingers crossed. But at the same time, taking all of that into consideration, this was a pretty colossal achievement. It's hard to tell just how colossal, though, estimates of how many people the expedition directly immunized are all over the place. You'll find numbers anywhere from 100000 to 300000 people.

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But the whole point was to establish vaccine programs that would continue after the expedition had moved on. And it's hard to tell exactly how many people that affected, even though the expedition established record keeping procedures in most of the places it visited. Many of those records have since been lost through changes in colonial administration, revolutions and wars. And really local responses to the vaccine were all over the place. Some cities and towns held parades to welcome the arrival of the vaccine, and people eagerly awaited their turn, while others practically revolted at the idea.

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In Oaxaca, for example, a mandatory vaccine program was ended after five years because of an uprising against it.

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In some places, the vaccine programs the expedition established kept going in spite of all of that. And in some cases they lasted for decades or even more than a century.

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But maintaining an arm to arm source of a vaccine is actually really hard. You want to vaccinate everyone because you want to eliminate smallpox, but at the same time, you need enough people who aren't already vaccinated to continue to act as vaccine hosts.

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So in Mexico City, for example, this led to a whole process to try to ensure that a hundred and sixty four children every year, preferably babies, were left unvaccinated. The responsibility for selecting these children was then divided up among the different wards of the city. This, just to me, seems like failure waiting to happen.

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Yes, there are so many layers of not OK to this onion. On top of the complexity of keeping the chain going, a lot of people just didn't want to. Getting a smallpox vaccine this way was painful. The cow pox or was itchy and gross and having the limb harvested nine or 10 days later was also painful. Sometimes parents just didn't bring their children back for that second visit or they hid their children when authorities were going house to house. There was also a lot of resistance to the vaccine in general, some of it justified, but some of it based on intentional anti vaccine misinformation.

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Compounding all of this, a lot of officials were just not good at calming the fears of anxious children and their families and instead treated everybody who was scared as though they were ignorant and backward Spanish.

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Health officials, whether they had been born in Spain or in the colonies, often did not approach indigenous or African people with any kind of cultural sensitivity or basic respect. So unsurprisingly, these kinds of efforts eventually broke down in most places, leaving health officials to look for other sources of vaccine to start up again. Another complication involved with this was the realization that the vaccine did not confer lifetime immunity to smallpox as people had believed it did when it was first introduced.

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So many places that still had vaccine programs going a couple of decades after the expedition had to adjust their procedures to re vaccinate people as their immunity wore off.

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When Guatemalan doctor Jose Flores had been asked to advise on how to introduce the smallpox vaccine to the Americas. He had praised the cowpox based vaccine as the, quote, easy and safe method to eradicate smallpox and forever liberate the inhabitants of those lands from the most frightening contagions. But obviously, although this campaign unquestionably save lives, it did not eradicate smallpox, although many of the vaccine programs that were implemented through this expedition tried to be thorough. It really, really takes a coordinated, truly global effort to eradicate a disease entirely.

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The idea of herd immunity was not really articulated until the early 20th century, so long after this was over. So the idea that there was sort of a target percentage of vaccinated people who would protect everyone was just not part of all this planning.

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So even after the expedition outbreaks, some of them serious, continued to happen all over the Spanish empire. As one example, Spain seeded the Philippines to the United States after the Spanish American war. And in the interest of protecting American soldiers from the disease, the U.S. Army started a vaccination program in the Philippines. In nineteen hundred, Army officials reported that anywhere from a quarter to a third of the people reporting to vaccine clinics had already had smallpox, actual smallpox, not cowpox as a vaccine.

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One reason was that the outlying areas relied on getting vaccine live from the central board in Manila. And in some places those supplies were disrupted for years at a time.

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Smallpox was eradicated from South America in 1971, so that was more than 160 years after the expedition. It was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980. So today, most people don't get a smallpox vaccine. Those who do are generally in roles like being a member of the military, people who would be at the most risk of exposure in the event of a bioterror attack. Also, thanks to manufacturing and refrigeration and preservation technologies, the smallpox vaccines that exist today do not require this arm to arm chain of human hosts.

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Obviously, they are much safer than they were in the 19th century. If you'd like to read a fictionalized version of this, you can check out the novel Saving the World. That is by author Julia Alvarez. This is also the second time one of Julia Alvarez's novels has come up on the show. We also talked about her novel In The Time of the Butterflies in our episode on The Mirabal Sisters.

[00:38:18]

Yeah, I read Saving the World when it very first came out. At that time, I was freelancing as a book reviewer, as a side gig, and that's actually where I first learned about this whole expedition, because it's a first person, not first person. It's a it's a fictional account. Focusing on Isabel is one of the main characters. And like her relationship with these boys who were in her care and the whole time I was reading, I was like, is this real?

[00:38:48]

A real human to human chain of children. That was many years ago. So I do not remember a lot of detail about the book, but I do remember reading it. Do you got some listener mail?

[00:38:59]

I do have listener mail. This listener mail is from Lucy and it follows our Unearth Urines that came out at the very beginning of twenty twenty one. Also, before I read it, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has sent us pictures of their knitting. I have I have replied to a lot of those folks to say thank you because they've been great, great pictures, but thanks to everybody who has done that. So Lucy sent this email.

[00:39:24]

Lucy said, I am an avid listener of the show and always love unearthed. This time, however, I was so excited to hear the story of the missing song from The Muppet Christmas Carol. It's my favorite Christmas movie and I sat down to watch it on Christmas Eve this year since I was feeling a little blue because, you know, twenty, twenty, just as when love is gone, should have played. But didn't something in my nearly 30 year old brain that has watched the film as many times, if not more, said, wait a minute, where's that song?

[00:39:53]

I thought. I was losing my mind. I was especially confused as I'd watched it on a relatively new large plussed streaming service. Not sure if you can reference that by name. And there was no reason to cut for time on a TV broadcast. Turns out the DVD version must have made its way to that plus streaming service. Thanks for proving that. I was, in fact, not imagining an entire song from the film. And thanks for everything you do on the show.

[00:40:16]

I have really enjoyed it for many years. I've attached a picture of my dog Coal for no other reason than I know you guys typically like to receive fun pet photos. Thanks, Lucy. Thanks, Lucy, for the email and for the picture of Cole. We've gotten several sort of different variations on the same theme of the song When Love is Gone from The Muppet Christmas Carol.

[00:40:40]

My understanding is that the master that they were going to reuse for, like the four Cremaster had been found, but they were not sure as of when it was reported whether it was going to be ready to actually broadcast in time for the Christmas holiday.

[00:40:58]

But we've also heard from lots of people and like various configurations of recordings of the Muppet Christmas Carol that they have and whether they do or do not include the song When Love Is Gone. I think I saw one this morning where somebody said they had both a full screen and a widescreen version and it had full screen.

[00:41:20]

The song is there, but in widescreen, the song is not so anyway, as the ongoing saga of the missing song. Thank you again, Lucy, for sending this email. If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, our history podcast, I heart radio dot com and we are all over social media had missed in history. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on our podcast and I heart radio app and anywhere else that get podcasts.

[00:41:57]

Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.