The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, Part 1

Once Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, it spread from England, where he lived, to other parts of the world. Meanwhile, events were unfolding that led the Spanish Empire to launch a huge expedition to take the vaccine to its colonies. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm tra c V Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Way
back in we had an episode on Edward Jenner and
the smallpox vaccine. I think that's also been a Saturday

(00:24):
classic more recently. In that episode, we mentioned Jenner's efforts
to send the vaccine to anybody who needed it, but
we really didn't get into any kind of detail about
what it actually took to distribute the smallpox vaccine around
the world. We did briefly mention the voyage of Francisco

(00:45):
Javier de Balmas, who carried the smallpox vaccine from Spain
to the America's using a chain of young boys who
acted as living vaccine hosts, and in episode I said
I wanted to do an episode on that someday. Given
how much focus there is on vaccines in the world
right now and on the logistics of actually getting the

(01:06):
vaccines to the people who need them, this seemed like
a good time for it. But then, as I was
researching this expedition, which I imagined as like a straightforward
one part episode of the show, I kept going down
a lot of rabbit holes, like how the vaccine got
to other parts of the world and how it wound

(01:27):
up already being established in some of the places that
Bombas went on this expedition, Like he would show up
somewhere and they would be like, Oh, we're vaccinated already.
How did that happen? So this grew into a two parter. Today,
we're going to talk about the smallpox vaccine spread from
England where Jenner lived, into other parts of the world,
and we'll set the stage for what led the Spanish

(01:48):
Empire to launch this huge expedition to take the vaccine
to its colonies, and the next time we're going to
talk about the expedition itself and its impact, and just
as a heads up, the process of vaccinating people for
smallpox and for propagating that vaccine in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. That was gross. Like I kind of recapped

(02:11):
the subject of this episode for some friends, and I
was like, I'm not going to get into the details
as we're sitting here having this casual conversation because it's
kind of gross. And a friend of mine who was
a nurse, was like, Oh, I know how they did it,
and now I'm upset. So I've tried to put most
specific medical details into like one easily skippable part of
the episode. But it's really not possible to talk about

(02:33):
the details of this expedition and the challenges they faced
without referring back to that at least somewhat. So if
things like sores and bodily fluids and needles really bother you,
these two episodes might be a little more of a challenge.
We're not going to repeat the entirety of our smallpox episode,

(02:54):
but we do need to set the stage with a
little bit about the disease in its vaccine, including some
of the details that were not in that episode. So
smallpox is caused by the very ola virus. It has
been eradicated in the wild today, but while it was
circulating freely in the world, it was a devastating illness
In places that had a long history of smallpox outbreaks,

(03:16):
it was typically fatal in about one third of cases,
but when it was introduced into places that had never
encountered it before, it killed closer to half of the
people who contracted it. The disease was also particularly deadly
in babies, with a much higher mortality rate of between
eighty and People who survived smallpox were typically immune to

(03:37):
it afterward, but often they had extensive scarring and long
term health effects. As early as the eleventh century, practitioners
in Asia developed a technique called vary elation, which used
material from smallpox stores or scabs to deliberately infect people
with the disease, and most of the time, people who

(03:58):
contracted smallpox in this way a milder and less deadly
infection than they would have otherwise, and vary elation was
about eighty percent effective. Variolation could still cause fatal complications,
though it involved transferring material from one person's body to another,
so if that first person had some other illness that

(04:19):
could also be transmitted along with the inoculation, and some
of these illnesses that were otherwise involved were serious. These
are things like syphilis and hepatitis, and variolation was in
use for centuries before people really made this connection. About
two percent of the people who were vary related died
either from smallpox or from another illness or infection that

(04:41):
they contracted during the process. It was also possible for
other people to develop full blown smallpox after exposure to
someone who had been vary elated. So while variolation was
safer than an uncontrolled smallpox outbreak, it still had some
very serious risks the practice the very elations spread first

(05:02):
from Asia into Africa, and it's possible that enslaved Africans
practiced it amongst themselves in the America's but Europeans and
European colonial officials didn't really start to become aware of
it or involved with it until the eighteenth century. One
of the biggest early proponents of very elation in Europe
was Lady Mary Worley Montague, who was the daughter of

(05:24):
a duke and survived smallpox when she was twenty six.
A couple of years later, her brother died from it.
She learned about very elation while her husband was serving
as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She had
her son very elated in seventeen eighteen and her daughter
in seventeen twenty one, and she became a vocal advocate

(05:45):
for this practice. Also in seventeen twenty one, vary elation
became more popular and more widely known in North America
after a small pox outbreak in Boston, Massachusetts. The Reverend
Cotton mother learned about vary elation from an enslaved man
named on Nesmus. Mather and physicians Zabdiel Boylston used vary
elation to try to control the outbreak. Vary Elation was

(06:08):
introduced into Chile as early as the seventeen sixties, but
for the rest of the Spanish colonies in the Americas
it came a little later. Again, this is like the
colonial authorities knowledge of it, not necessarily whether enslaved people
were performing it among themselves. Dr Esteban Morrell administered the
first documented vary elation in New Spain and what's now

(06:30):
Mexico in seventeen seventy nine, and the practice was introduced
into other parts of the Spanish Empire in the seventeen
seventies and eighties as well. So we noted earlier that
vary elation was still a risky procedure and efforts to
introduce it as a preventative measure could have unintended and
devastating effects beyond complications for individual recipients. In seventeen eighty nine,

(06:54):
a smallpox outbreak in Australia spread to its Aboriginal peoples
who had not encountered the disease before the source of
this outbreak might have been smallpox material that British doctors
brought to Australia for the purposes of inoculating people, although
there is some debate about whether that material would have
still been infective by the time the outbreak started. In

(07:16):
the late eighteenth century, various people in Europe noticed that
milk maids seemed to be immune to smallpox. The connection
here was another viral illness called cow pox, which is
much milder and less lethal than smallpox. Edward Jenner was
one of the people who made this connection, and also
one of the people who tried to intentionally expose people

(07:39):
to cow pox with the hope of giving them immunity
to smallpox. The word vaccine actually comes from the Latin
word for cow For this reason. Jenner did this for
the first time in seventeen ninety six, and although he
wasn't the first to try it, or even the first
to do it successfully, he did devote himself to it afterward. Later,

(08:00):
he published a pamphlet called an Inquiry into the Causes
and Effects of Variola Vaccinate, which detailed his work with
the vaccine and became a major source of information about it.
He built an immunization clinic in his garden, which he
called the Temple of Vaccinia, and he sent vaccine samples
to anyone who asked for it. As Tracy mentioned earlier,

(08:22):
although it was still possible to transmit other diseases during
the vaccine process, intentionally exposing someone to cow pox was
far less risky than vary elation was. So here's what
this process actually involved, which will be the most squeamish
part of these episodes. You would start by draining and

(08:42):
collecting the lymph from an active cow pox sore, and
then you would use a lancet, a needle, or some
other instrument to pierce the skin of the vaccine recipient,
typically on their arm. You would introduce the lymph into
that opening, and then if everything went well, the vaccine
recipient would contract cow pox, and nine or ten days

(09:03):
later they would have a sore that was ready to
be harvested to make more vaccine, and then, having recovered
from cow pox, they would be immune to smallpox for
years afterward. Jenner actually thought this immunity was for the
rest of their life, but that turned out not to
be true. Jenner and others worked out some ways to
preserve cow pox limp for future use. This included impregnating

(09:25):
silk threads with lymph and allowing them to dry or
sealing lymph in vials. Another method was to dry the
lymph and seal it between glass plates to be reconstituted
before use. Eventually, people worked out ways to preserve viable
lymph on the ends of lancets, but none of these
methods were perfect. The limp flust its potency over time,

(09:47):
especially in hot or humid weather, and it was extremely
common for Jenner and others to send vaccine samples that
just did not work by the time they got to
the recipient. So the most reliable way to keep a
viable supply of smallpox vaccine, especially for a long time
or in hot weather, was by propagating it through the

(10:08):
people who were being vaccinated. This was also known as
the arm to arm method. Nine or ten days after
being vaccinated, people would need to return to the practitioner
so their lymph could be used to make more vaccines.
Then those recipients would do the same thing, and that
would go on and on like a chain. Keeping a
vaccine program going with this process required some planning numbers

(10:31):
vary based on the skill of the practitioner and the
cow pox sre itself. But most of the time you
could get multiple doses of vaccine from one cow pox sore,
so at least in theory, the number of people you
could vaccinate would grow over time, even if you were
also trying to preserve some lymph as a backup. But
if people stopped returning to have their lymph collected, or

(10:53):
if a community ran out of people to vaccinate, the
chain would break. Cow Pox is also rare enough in
the wild that it could it takes some time to
find a new source if the human chain broke. At
one point, Jenner had to stop his work for two
years because he ran out of lymph and no active
cases could be found in cattle. So it was relatively

(11:13):
easy to introduce smallpox vaccine into places with mild weather
that we're geographically close to each other, but beyond that
it got a lot harder. We'll talk about that after
a sponsor break. Edward Jenner spent so much of his

(11:34):
time and energy sending people smallpox vaccine that he started
calling himself the vaccine Clerk to the world. But a
lot of other people were instrumental in introducing the vaccine
beyond Britain and Ireland, and some of those introductions were
pretty complicated. Jean de Carrot was a Swiss physician who
moved to Vienna because of its prominence in the world

(11:56):
of medicine. In August of he performed the first smallpox
vaccination in the Austro Hungarian Empire. He got his limb
from another Swiss physician, Alexander Gaspar mar Sette, who was
living in Edinburgh and had become close friends with Jenner,
and after his first successful vaccination, Caro aggressively distributed the

(12:18):
vaccine into Central Europe, Russia and Eastern Asia. Jean de
Caro was also involved in introducing the vaccine into the
Ottoman Empire. He was at a banquet with Mary and
William Hamilton Nesbit, whose daughter Mary was married to Thomas Bruce,
the seventh Earl of Elgin. Yes, this is the same
elegin that we talked about in our two part are

(12:40):
on the Parthenon Marbles. After this banquet, the Nasbits told
the Elgins about this vaccine. Elgin wrote to Ko in
September of eight hundred to ask for example, when he
got it. Elgin used that sample to vaccinate his son
and then used his son's vaccine site to start vaccinating
other people. Elgin's introduced a large scale vaccination program in Constantinople,

(13:04):
and they also carried the vaccine to Greece. Meanwhile, to
English doctors Joseph A. Marshall and John Walker worked with
Jenner to get passage aboard the HMS and Demian, where
they introduced the vaccine to Minorca, Gibraltar, and Malta. Over
the last few months of eighteen hundred. As all this
was happening, the vaccine was also being introduced in North America.

(13:27):
Jenner sent samples of smallpox lymph to Newfoundland and early
eighteen hundred at the request of his friend John Clinch.
Clinch used the threads that he received to vaccinate his
family and then from there to vaccinate roughly seven hundred
other people in Newfoundland. Benjamin Waterhouse, who was a professor
at Harvard Medical School, also requested Jenner's lymph in eighteen hundred,

(13:49):
which he used to vaccinate his son. Then he used
that son's vaccination site to prepare the vaccine for another son.
After these and other successful vaccine nations, Waterhouse gave some
of the vaccine to then Vice President Thomas Jefferson. This
actually took them a few tries. The vaccine kept breaking
down in the Virginia heat until Jefferson devised a nested

(14:12):
box that used a layer of water to keep the
inner contents cool. Once he had working vaccine, Jefferson tested
it on his family and his enslaved workforce. After Jefferson
became president, he and Waterhouse started planning mass vaccination campaigns,
and Waterhouse tried to maintain a monopoly on the vaccine

(14:32):
for his own financial gain. This did not really work
out for him, though. Getting the vaccine from Britain to
northeast North America was relatively easy. A packet ship could
make the journey in roughly twenty to thirty days, and
during that time it was in the cool climate of
the North Atlantic. So when Waterhouse tried to make himself

(14:53):
the sole source of vaccine in the United States, people
just started writing directly to Jenner to get it from
him instead. I love that. Uh. During all of this,
Jefferson also started using the vaccine as a diplomatic tool
with indigenous nations Europeans. Introduction of smallpox into the America's
has been absolutely devastating to indigenous people's so then using

(15:17):
a vaccine as a diplomatic gesture is really horrifying from
a human rights perspective. Jefferson also ordered the Lewis and
Clark expedition to carry a supply of the vaccine with them,
but in Lewis's words, their supply had quote lost its
virtue by the time they got it, and there is
no record of the expedition actually vaccinating anyone. And eighteen

(15:38):
o one, Empress Dowager Marie Fyodorovna, the widow of Zar Paul,
the first requested smallpox lymph from Prussia, and then that
was used to immanize orphans in Moscow. The first to
be vaccinated was a young boy from Moscow Foundling Home,
who the Empress renamed Vaccinoff. Vaccinoff was then granted a

(15:59):
lifetime pen Shin have mixed feelings on that whole thing.
To all, the successful vaccine introductions that we have talked
about so far have been over relatively short and relatively
cool distances. For longer, hotter trips, things became a lot
more complicated than just putting some threads of vaccine on
a packet ship. Jenner tried to send multiple samples of

(16:21):
vaccine to the Indian subcontinent by sea, all of which
were either lost in shipwrecks or lost their potency before arriving.
So he started trying to persuade Lord Hobart, Secretary of
State for War and the Colonies, to send the vaccine
using twenty unvaccinated people who would act as a living
chain of hosts. When Hobart didn't really seem interested in

(16:44):
doing this, Jenner offered to pay for it himself, and
he only let this subject drop when he learned that
the vaccine had been successfully introduced into India, which was
also thanks to John de Caro, who we talked about earlier.
Carol had started getting his vaccine LIMP from Italy rather
than from Britain. He sent some from Vienna to Constantinople

(17:07):
which is now Istanbul, where somebody was vaccinated with it.
That person then traveled to Baghdad, where their LIMP was
used to immunize someone else. That person traveled from Baghdad
to the port city of Bastra. From there, the vaccine
was carried by sea to Bombay now known as Mumbai
on a ship appropriately called the Recovery with Vaccines administered

(17:29):
on the ship to keep the chain going. The first
successful vaccination record on the Indian subcontinent was administered on
June fourteenth, eighteen o two. The recipient was Anna dust Tall,
age three, who was the daughter of a servant in
a British captain's household. More than one thousand other people
were vaccinated in Bombay over the next four months, and

(17:51):
from there the vaccine was introduced to other parts of India.
Beyond this, the vaccine was introduced into several other parts
of the world. Again use these armed arm chains of
hosts in the early nineteenth century. Sometimes this was after
other efforts had already failed. For example, the first shipment
of vaccine since U Batavia, which is now Jakarta, Indonesia,

(18:13):
had lost its potency by the time it arrived. A
second successful attempt in eighteen o four involved twelve children
who formed an armed arm chain during the sea voyage.
The first successful smallpox vaccinations in Australia were also administered
in May of that year, although it's not totally clear
which of the attempts to send the vaccine there was

(18:35):
the successful one. In eighteen hundred, Portuguese authorities called for
vaccination to be introduced into its colony in Brazil, but
its roundabout way of doing so took five years. A
group of enslaved children was transported from Baia to Lisbon
so that they could act as an arm to arm
chain on the return trip back to Brazil, and then

(18:57):
in March of eighteen o four that plan was activated
and the Prince Regent had his sons vaccinated in Lisbon
to form the first link in that arm to arm
chain as they traveled back to South America. Got About
the same time, Britain was trying to introduce the vaccine
to Fort Marlborough in western Indonesia, and this involved a
chain of four and five year old children from the

(19:18):
Bengal Military Orphan Society. Many of these were either the
orphaned children of British soldiers or they were the children
of British soldiers born out of wedlock to Indian mothers.
These children departed aboard the Carmarthen in December of eighteen
o three in the care of two Indian nurses, and
they arrived at the fort in February of eighteen o four.

(19:41):
After successful vaccinations at the fort, the children were returned
back to the Orphan society. You have probably noticed that
most of the armed to arm vaccination chains that we
have talked about used children as hosts, and there were
several reasons for this. One was that widespread smallpox outbreaks
tended to recur with several years in between, so young

(20:02):
children were the least likely to have already been exposed.
If you tried to vaccinate someone who was already immune,
no cow pox store would develop and that would break
the chain. And another was more of a publicity angle,
and many parts of the world there was a lot
of resistance to the idea of injecting people with something
that had come from an animal. In general, there were

(20:25):
just a lot of different social and cultural and religious
objections to the whole idea of vaccination, so children were
often seen as innocent and pure, and often when the
vaccine was introduced into a new location, the first recipients
were intentionally chosen to be children from quote good families,

(20:45):
to sort of serve as an example for the rest
of the community. Before we take a quick break, we
have a couple of other quick points to note. One
was that even though it was geographically close to other
places where the vaccine was already in use, Japan was
really satively late in receiving the vaccine. Japan's borders at
this point were closed to most of the rest of

(21:06):
the world, and even the Chinese and the Dutch, who
had trading privileges with Japan, were not allowed to bring
children into port. Various efforts to send preserved lymph to
Japan failed before viable vaccine finally arrived in eighteen forty nine.
The other is that they're just really does not seem
to have been a meaningful effort to introduce the vaccine

(21:28):
or knowledge about the vaccine into Sub Saharan Africa during
all this. If there was such an effort, I sure
did not find it in my search. As we noted earlier,
vary elation had been established in many parts of Africa
for centuries before Jenner started propagating his vaccine. Most documented
efforts to try to control smallpox in Sub Saharan Africa

(21:52):
focus on vary elation rather than vaccination. The shift to
vaccination seems to have followed the Scramble for Africa, in
which European nations divided the continent of Africa up amongst
themselves in the late nineteenth and early twenty centuries. The
earliest clear records of smallpox vaccine campaigns in Sub Saharan

(22:13):
Africa really start with European colonial administrations in the early
twentieth century, rather than when we're talking about decades before that.
We'll talk about what led to the Balmast expedition specifically
after we first take a quick sponsor break. Since we're

(22:36):
going to be talking about Spain's efforts to vaccinate its
colonies against smallpox, we want to touch on a little
bit about the diseases history in the America's Europeans introduced
smallpox into the America's in the sixteenth century, and the
likely earliest case was on the island of Hispaniola in
eighteen The first documented transmission on a South American continent

(22:58):
was reportedly from an enslaved African who had been transported
there by Panfeo di Narvez of Spain in fifty Because
the indigenous people of the Americas had never been exposed
to smallpox, they had no natural immunity to it, and
the results were especially devastating and destructive. For example, the
Aztec Empire numbered at least twenty six million people at

(23:21):
the start of the Spanish conquest of the America's By
sixteen twenty, their population was reduced to roughly one point
six million, with smallpox being a leading cause of death.
This happened long before the development of the smallpox vaccine,
and while there are reports of enslaved Africans practicing variolation
in the America's, it was also before European and colonial

(23:43):
governments were really aware of the practice. In the late
eighteenth century, multiple members of the Spanish royal family contracted smallpox.
King Carlos the Fort's brother Gabrielle and his sister in
law Maria Anna Victoria both died along with their newborn son.
Queen Maria Luisa and one of their daughters contracted smallpox

(24:03):
and later recovered, but their daughter, Maria Teresa, died of
it in seventeen ninety four at the age of only three.
In response to all of this, the King and Queen
decided to have the rest of the royal family vary
related and on November seventeen, the King decreed that the
general populations should be very elated as well. Then in

(24:26):
seventeen an Italian doctor sent the king a copy of
Edward Jenner's book on vaccination. Many of the people who
had been very elated in Spain after that sevent decree,
had experienced scarring and other complications, so the King was
invested in the idea of moving to a safer way
of preventing smallpox. Within a year of the King getting

(24:47):
a copy of Jenner's book, vaccination was widely available in Spain.
At the same time, multiple smallpox outbreaks were affecting Spain's
colonies in the Americas, and the member of eighteen o two,
the city government of Santa Fe de Bogota and what's
now Colombia, wrote to the King warning of this outbreak

(25:08):
and asking for financial help and fighting an epidemic. This
probably was not the only such communication that the king received,
but it's the one that's most often cited as inspiring
him to figure out a way to get the smallpox
vaccine to the Spanish colonies. Part of the King's motivation
for all of this was definitely humanitarian. Smallpox was contagious

(25:30):
and deadly, and he did want to save lives, but
there were also huge political and economic benefits to controlling
or eliminating smallpox. It's also clear that there were business
people and advisers to the King who thought that Vaccinating
the colonies most at risk people, including indigenous people, would
ultimately bring more wealth to the Spanish Empire. The Napoleonic

(25:53):
Wars began in eighteen o three, which made this whole
situation even more urgent. Smallpox was already known to Deva
state armies and navies during wartime, so Carlos the Fourth
directed the Council of the Indies, which governed Spain's colonies
in the Americas, to assess whether it would be possible
to introduce generous smallpox vaccine there. The Council's chief minister,

(26:16):
Francisco Ricana, saw the advice of Guatemalan doctor Jose Flores.
In addition to being an experienced doctor, Flores had seen
the devastating effects of smallpox in the Spanish colonies firsthand,
and he had overseen vary elation campaigns in Guatemala in
the seventeen eighties and nineties, so even before the king

(26:37):
had started his vary elation program in Spain, Flora's very
elation campaign had focused primarily on Maya communities, especially those
living in densely populated areas outside the capital city of
Nueva Guatemala. He prioritized inoculating people who were too young
to have been exposed to smallpox in earlier epidemics. He

(26:58):
also seems to have tried to be positive to the
needs of the people he was inoculating. When it was
reported that children and their parents were frightened by the
medical instruments that were used for the procedure, he developed
an alternative that used a poultice made from beetles to
irritate the skin rather than using instruments to cut or
pierce it. Yeah, sometimes his sensitivity, I would say, got

(27:20):
to the point of almost being patronizing, which isn't entirely surprising,
but like he did consistently take care to be like,
don't traumatize people while you're doing this. Right, If you
make them too afraid to be inoculated, none of this works. Right.
So Flores had left Guatemala in seventeen nineties six, and

(27:42):
then he had studied medicine all over Europe, and when
he learned about Jenner's vaccination that used cow pox, he
had written to his colleagues back in Guatemala about it.
These colleagues conducted a systematic search of all the cattle
in the region, and they found no active cases of
cow pox among them. This isn't really surprising that they

(28:04):
looked at all the cattle and didn't find any cow pox.
As we noted earlier, cow pox is relatively rare in
the wild, and it's also mostly found in Europe and
Asia and not in other parts of the world. So
when the Council of the Indies asked for Flora's to
give his advice, his thoughts were based on both his
experiences in Guatemala and from what he had learned while
he was studying in Europe. He suspected that a broader

(28:27):
search for cow pox elsewhere in the Spanish colonies would
also turn up nothing. He knew that preserved vaccine lymph
was not likely to survive the voyage from Spain to
the America's, so he proposed two voyages, one to the
Caribbean and Central America and the other to South America.
He recommended that each ship used multiple redundant methods to

(28:49):
carry smallpox vaccine, so with preserved lymph, with cattle, and
with an arm to arm chain of vaccinated children. Flora's
also recommended a system for keeping up with who had
been vaccinated and who had not. At this point in
history of the Catholic Church had enormous influence over everyday
life in Spain and in its colonies, and clergy were

(29:11):
already responsible for documenting things like baptisms and deaths, so
Flora's recommended that priests be the ones to keep vaccine
registries as part of this whole project. He also recommended
framing vaccination almost as a sacrament, with vaccine lymph being
stored in churches along with consecrated oil and other religious items.

(29:33):
At this point, medical schools and hospitals were already well
established in Spain's colonies, with the first medical schools having
been established by the Dominican Order in the sixteenth century.
So Flora's recommended training these existing doctors in administering vaccines
and in collecting, preserving, and distributing the lymph to keep
the cycle going. He also recommended that the vaccines be

(29:55):
given at no cost to the recipients, and he repeatedly
stressed that anyone who is administering vaccines should take great
care not to frighten or traumatize their recipients, particularly indigenous
recipients who were likely to be suspicious or fearful of
Spanish authorities. Justifiably so. Really, the Council of the Indies

(30:19):
agreed to a plan. On March eighteen o three, the
King signed a Royal Edict for the Spanish Royal Philanthropic
Expedition of the Vaccine a few months later on June.
On September one, instructions were sent out to the rest
of the Empire and forming authorities and all these colonies
that the expedition was coming, and giving them instructions on

(30:41):
how to prepare and what to do when the expedition
got there. The whole thing was extremely well planned and organized,
with one exception, the instructions didn't say anything about how
to pay for it. This led to a range of
disputes about everything from establishing a budget for a newly
created vaccine board to offering lodging while the expedition was there.

(31:05):
Although the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition did not wind up
following all of Flores's advice, what followed has been described
as the world's first global public health campaign. Although it
we'll talk about in Part two, and as we already
kind of mentioned, it wasn't entirely global. It was about
mostly Spain and Spain's colonies. And we'll get into more

(31:29):
about that next time. In the meantime, do you have
a listener mail? Yeah, I do have listener mail. This
is from Carl and this is um. This this email
is from a while ago. I have some emails from
a while ago that I I flagged to read and
then that I had didn't actually read them. This goes
all the way back to our episode on Jim Thorpe
from last November, and Carl says, Dear Holly and Tracy.

(31:53):
As someone who has lived in Oklahoma since two thousand
one and works for university that started as a Cherokee
women's ementary school, I listened to your three part Jim
Thorpe episode with great interest. I thought I would reach
out and share a curious piece of information connected to
Thorpe that you might appreciate. From two thousand one, I
worked at one of the busiest public libraries and Tulsa.

(32:15):
Shortly after I started working there, I was asked by
a patron to find books about Jim Thorpe. I was
surprised to not find any on the shelf, so I
steered them towards some databases to find other resources. Later,
I asked one of my co workers about the situation,
and they informed me that this was a problem that
had been ongoing for many years. The library continually bought

(32:38):
books on Jim Thorpe, but some unknown person would routinely
vandalize the books soon after they hit the shelves, blacking
out Thorpe's name and defacing photos of him. Of course,
the books then had to be withdrawn. This happened across
all twenty five branches of the Tulsa City County Library System,
and it continued through most of my tenure. They are

(33:00):
as I was transitioning my career into academic libraries, they
were finally starting to be able to keep the books
on the shelf. We assume that the vandal had either
moved out of Tulsa or passed away. As I listened
to the podcast, I kept wondering what the vandals motivation
might have been. Were they carrying a grudge about Thorpe's
position on the sac and Fox Constitution matter, where they

(33:23):
upset about the Olympics, where they connected to the family
dispute over his remains. Were they simply acting out of racism.
Since they were never caught, it will remain a mystery.
I remain a faithful listener and hope you still have
the knitted postcard I sent you a few years back.
I also continue to hope that you will put out
an episode about the San Patricio's a k a. St.

(33:45):
Patrick's Battalion on your list. They were American soldiers, mostly
of Irish descent, who defected and fought on the Mexican
side during the Mexican American War. Keep up the great
work and happy holidays to you and yours. Because this
email is from so long ago, this is from Carl,
So thank you Carl so much for sending this. For
a couple of reasons. What what a fascinating and weird

(34:08):
mystery about the fate of books on JIMP Library System. UM,
I am deeply curious if any of our other listeners
have worked in libraries and are like, oh man, we
started having this problem with books on Jim Thorpe Uh
that it's just weird ums as a thing that a

(34:31):
person would take it upon themselves to do. And also
I just I also wanted to note I do have
that postcard. It is sitting over with UM. I have
that postcard and I don't remember the person's name. Somebody
sent us the postcard where they they drew a picture
of um a fictional band named Margie and the Love

(34:54):
Bond tintometers after our brother versus Margarine episode. And I
have both of those displayed in my little home office
because I love them. So. Thank you, Carl, thank you
for this email. I am glad that the books are
no longer being defaced because that sounds like an upsetting
thing for everybody involved. Having worked in a library. This

(35:15):
is my whole side note, uh fret over it. Aside
from all of the like racist and social implications of it,
library budgets are not expansive. That really stinks. To have
the expenditures be defaced immediately would be incredibly frustrating. Yeah,

(35:36):
please do not deface library books. Um. So again, thank
you Carl for that email. If you would like to
email us or about this or any other podcast or
history podcast and I Heart radio dot com and then
we're all over social media adminston History, so you'll find
our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. We're going to be honest,
we haven't been all that active on them in a while.

(36:00):
Putting her there. Uh, and you can subscribe to our
show in the I Heart Radio app or Apple podcasts,
or anywhere else that you get the casts. Stuff you
missed in history Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the iHeart

(36:20):
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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