Charles Darwin’s family-sponsored, 1831 expedition on HMS Beagle kindles the western imagination these days.
But far less well-known is the round-the-world voyage financed three decades earlier by Spain’s King Charles IV to administer an early and well-regarded form of smallpox prophylaxis, called variolation (from variola, the scientific name for smallpox), to all the children in the far-flung Spanish empire, including Mexico, San Diego, San Francisco, Texas, Arizona and even the Philippines and China.
Variolation was deliberately infecting a person via skin scratches or inhalation with a mild form of smallpox, taken from a sick person’s blisters. It protected against severe disease, and was the technique used by the (misnamed) Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine.
The Spanish expedition was eventually given high praise by the legendary British doctor Edward Jenner, who is credited with inventing the modern smallpox vaccine around the same time as Spain’s variolating “hospital ship” set off.
“I don’t imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this,” Jenner said of Spain’s effort, known in English as the Balmis Expedition.
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