“They Called Me the Antichrist”: Opposition to Smallpox Vaccination in the Spanish Empire

In 1803, in the wake of Edward Jenner’s popularization of the discovery that cowpox provided safe and reliable immunity against smallpox, the Spanish Crown began an enthusiastic vaccination campaign, opening vaccination rooms on the peninsula and allowing Dr. Francisco Xavier Balmis y Berenguer to sail around the world to bring the vaccine to the diverse populations of the Spanish Empire. The response to the vaccination campaign varied considerably from place to place. On the peninsula, people lined up by the hundreds in Alicante to receive the vaccination, while few if any volunteered for the procedure in Madrid. As he circumnavigated the globe, Balmis and his assistant, José Salvany, found that while some colonial elites enthusiastically accepted vaccination as benefit of “modern” science, others viewed smallpox as a disease of Indians and slaves, and refused to have their children vaccinated. However, opposition to vaccination was not merely a simplistic projection of race and class hierarchies. In some places indigenous peoples lined up at vaccination rooms, while in the mountains of Peru mothers fled to the mountains and called Salvany “the AntiChrist” rather than vaccinate their children and in central Mexico, mothers brought their children to be vaccinated but then asked for the “poison” to be removed. This paper will examine the varieties of opposition to some of the earliest efforts at smallpox vaccination, discuss how Balmis and other authorities attempted to overcome that opposition, and consider how those early anti-vaxxers provide insight into the race and class-based opposition to vaccination today