Medical Humanitarianism and Smallpox Innoculation Campaigns in Eighteenth-Century Guatemala

In 1780, various political, medical, and religious elites introduced to the Audiencia of Guatemala the first wave of smallpox inoculation that contained human smallpox matter.  While this attempt was small in scale, encompassing only the capital city of Nueva Guatemala and the surrounding indigenous Maya pueblos, subsequent smallpox epidemics in the 1790s and 1800s were met with increasingly geographically extensive and militarized campaigns that successfully vaccinated tens of thousands of inhabitants.

This paper explores the concurrent development of medical humanitarianism, a discourse that framed the anti-smallpox programs, and other early public health campaigns in eighteenth-century Guatemala. I argue that medical humanitarianism drew on traditional calls to a "Catholic spirit" to counteract human suffering, a religious-based conception of moral responsibility that formed an important element in community responses during the pre-inoculation era, when many saw medical physicians as largely unsuccessful in halting epidemics.  Starting in the 1760s, supporters of public health programs adapted global Enlightenment ideologies that celebrated the promise of medical innovation, and were tailored by local and Audiencia elites to health problems specific to Guatemala, who saw the campaigns as a new way to reintegrate indigenous Maya populations into the late-colonial state.

Medical humanitarianism created a new language of moral responsibility with both religious and medical components. Indeed, this discourse included paternalist and colonial elements that emphasized the need to save the Indians from themselves, and from their own medical cultures and practitioners, who had their own responses to epidemics.  While the health benefits of variolization, vaccination, and other measures provided measurably beneficial effects to many colonial peoples, this was also a conflictive and often coercive process, one that allowed for and legitimated new kinds of material, cultural and physical interventions into indigenous and mixed-race communities.