Francisco Javier de Balmis Undertakes the First International Health-Care Expedition

On November 30, 1803 Spanish physician Francisco Javier de Balmis and his team embarked from La Coruña, Spain, on an expedition to vaccinate the people of Spanish America against smallpox. This three year voyage, which became known as the Balmis Expedition, is considered the first international health care expedition. Of it Edward Jenner wrote, ""I don’t imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this."

Born in Alicante, Spain,  Francisco Balmis moved to Havana, and later to Mexico City. In Mexico City he was principal surgeon at the Hospital of San Juan de Dios. There he studied plant remedies for venereal disease, and published Demostracion de las eficaces virtudes nuevamente descubiertas en las raices de dos plantas de Nueva-España, especies de ágave y de begónia, para la curacion del vicio venéreo y escrofuloso in Madrid in 1794. Back in Spain, he became the royal physician to King Charles IV. Balmis was able to convince the king to support the expedition after the king's daughter suffered the illness.

On the ship Maria Pita Balmis sailed with a deputy surgeon, two assistants, two first-aid practitioners, three nurses, Isabel López de Gandalia, the rectoress of Casa de Expósitos, an orphanage in La Coruña, and 22 orphan boys, eight to ten years old, who served as successive carriers of the disease. The mission carried the vaccine to the Canary Islands, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, the Philippines and China. The ship carried also scientific instruments and copies of Balmis's 1803 translation into Spanish of Traité historique et pratique de la vaccine (1801) by Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe:

Tratado histórico y práctico de la vacuna que contiene en compendio el orígen y los resultados de las observaciones y experimentos sobre la vacuna, con un exámen imparcial de sus ventajas, y de las objeciones que se le han puesto, con todo lo demás que concierne á la práctica del nuevo modo de inocular

 to be distributed to the local vaccine commissions which Balmis founded in the cities he visited. 

"In Puerto Rico, the local population was already inoculated from the Danish colony of Saint Thomas. In Venezuela, the expedition divided at La Guayra. José Salvany, the deputy surgeon, went toward today's Colombia and the Viceroyalty of Peru (Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia). They took seven years and the toils of the voyage brought death to Salvany (Cochabamba, 1810). Balmis went to Caracas and later to Havana. The local poet Andrés Bello wrote an ode to Balmis. In Mexico, Balmis took 25 orphans to maintain the infection during the crossing of the Pacific. In the Philippines, they received help from the Catholic church. Balmis sent most of the expedition back to Mexico while he went on to China, where he visited Macau and Canton. On his way back to Spain, Balmis convinced the authorities of Saint Helena (1806) to be inoculated" (Wikipedia article on Balmis Expedition, accessed 05-14-2014.)

(This entry was last revised in December 2016).