Balmis's expedition

Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition

The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition was a healthcare mission financed by the Spanish crown that carried out the smallpox vaccination method developed by Edward Jenner to the Spanish colonies with the aim of vaccinating the population and institutionalising the practice. Its members employed humans as carriers of the vaccine, mainly orphan children, vaccinating them one after the other so that they would always have a fresh supply of the vaccine’s fluid. It sailed on 30 November 1803 from La Coruña and later divided into two main groups, each one finishing in different years: the Sub-expedition Balmis in 1807, and the Sub-expedition Salvany by the end of 1811.

Despite the efforts of the members of the expedition, the vaccination method developed by Jenner did not arrive solely through them. In Peru, as well as in other territories of Spanish America, the vaccine would arrive by the hands of merchants or by petition from the authorities sent to other points of the globe where the vaccine had spread already. The imperative of establishing institutional guidelines for the preservation of the citizen’s health, on the other hand, was pushed by the expeditionaries. This translated into the creation of committees, Juntas de Vacuna, in the densest and most influential cities of America, which should be responsible for the preservation of the vaccine’s fluid and of periodic vaccinations.

Purpose of this website

This website's aim is accessibility. Thus, one of the goals here is to make accessible online the transcriptions of the documentation on both the Balmis expedition and the main Peruvian sources on early vaccination. The second goal was to provide a digital reconstruction of the paths taken by the members of the Expedition. This is not centred around the events that surrounded the members, but rather on the journey itself: where they passed by and when, according to what is stated in the primary sources.

Display of primary sources

The website is built in English, yes, but the main sources are in Spanish. Therefore, I am not translating them, for the sake of avoiding losing information in the translation, just transcribing them. The transcription criteria for both sets of documents are presented here too.

On one hand, there is the Indiferente 1558A: the main source on the expedition as a whole. Because of its unquestionable value, this huge file has served as the basis for the multiple works done around the expedition, such as the book of Gonzalo Díaz de Yraola or the many publications of Susana María Ramírez Martín.

On the other hand, there is the Libro de Reales Ordenes y Actas: an important and quite overlooked source for the Peruvian vaccination history; very little research has been done on it. And only three scholars have properly addressed its content: Enrique Ruiz, in 1904; Ramón Ribeyro, in 1918; and Juan Bautistas Lastres, in the decade of 1950.

Maps of the Expedition

Six maps that illustrate the paths the members of the Expedition took while travelling across America and Asia:

One depicts the joint part of the Expedition
Two depict the Sub-expedition Balmis
Three on the Sub-expedition Salvany

These maps allow users to advance through the journey of the expedition stop by stop in the hope of transmitting the feeling of movement that is strongly linked to travelling. Also, information about the towns, coming mainly from primary sources, is presented in a clear manner, whether in the form of pop-ups or in the panel next to the map.

Example: Mini project for the ESU DH 2026

It is possible to do experiments with the data available. For example, I would like to know whether summary and non summary versions of some of the expedition's documents are possible to measure in terms of entropy level.

In just one sentence, it can be framed as: Does the entropy in a text correlates with an specific version of a text?

Hypothesis

Hypothesis 1: A high entropy level in a summary version is explained by the use of very specific words to account for something that can be written with common ones in a non summary version of the same event.

Hypothesis 2: A low entropy level in a summary version is explained by the use of fixed phrases that can account for different statements that use more detailed vocabulary in a non summary version of the same event.

Results

Data

The files needed for this calculation are .txt runned by a Python code. You can find them here.

How it was made

The transcriptions that are available in this website are all in .html for display purposes. In order to work with them, it is necessary to convert them into .txt files, wich are easier to handle with Python when it comes to text analysis. Once the .txt are ready, it is a must to make the data "nicer"; this means to strip out all ortographic elements (?, !, ", [, ., etc.) and extra annotation information (number of folio, metadata, etc.).

The rest is pretty straight forward. I used the scripts on entropy provided during the classes of the ESU DH 2026 on Measuring Manuscripts by Christian Casey. Finally, I presented my results in a simple bar grap using Python's library Matplotlib.