Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine

In 1804, the Spanish Crown introduced the smallpox vaccine to its empire, where vaccination was voluntary and where consent was a natural right ceded to parents. Despite these ostensible protections, authorities relied on enslaved, Indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to incubate and reproduce the live vaccine and transport it across the empire. Analyzing this set of historical relations, Dr. Yero will ask what consent meant for parents and for children who were compelled to navigate epidemic disease, new means of prevention, but also the unequal structures of power that worked to narrowly define both freedom and motherhood through a colonial order of whiteness. Authorities assumed that it was mothers who would dictate their children ’ s care, and because of this, we have evidence of how women reacted to immunization, if framed through expectations of proper maternal behavior. However, these materials can also help us understand the specific anxieties and concerns that women faced in making healthcare decisions for themselves and their families. Notably concerns and rumors over kidnapping, debt, and enslavement remained a latent threat that influenced how Black and Indigenous mothers made sense of this new technology, prompting many to seek out the vaccine through channels they could trust. Dr. Yero ’ s talk will draw on collections of the NLM History of Medicine Division, including institutional regulations and vaccination guides from the Spanish Americas, to analyz...
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