The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, Part 2

With the smallpox vaccine established, Spain’s wanted to deliver it to its colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. Francisco Xavier de Balmis carried the vaccine from Spain to the Americas using a chain of young boys who acted as living vaccine hosts.

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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 Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. This is part
two of our episode on the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition,

(00:22):
which was Spain's effort to deliver the smallpox vaccine to
its colonies and the Americas and the Caribbean, and to
implement widespread vaccine programs in those colonies once the vaccine
had been introduced. This expedition involved a human chain of
boys from foundling homes and charity hospitals who acted as
living hosts for this vaccine. Last time, we covered the

(00:46):
basics of smallpox and how the vaccine made its way
to other parts of the world and sort of the
the setup for Spain embarking on this. Today we are
going to talk about the expedition itself, which was authorized
by Royal Charter on June three, And as we noted
in part one, the method of vaccinating people for smallpox

(01:07):
in the early nineteenth century was a little gruesome, and
most of that detail is in the earlier episode, but
like you just got to refer back to it in
talking about this so just note it will be in
this episode as well. Although Guatemalan doctor Jose Flores had
advised the Council of the Indies on how to approach

(01:28):
this expedition, the person who was actually tasked with carrying
it out was expedition director Francisco Xavier de Balmas Berenger.
Balmas was a physician and army surgeon who had been
born in seventeen fifty three. He had been named Honorary
Surgeon of the Chamber of King Carlos the fourth of Spain,
and he had gone on earlier voyages to the America's

(01:49):
to study and collect medicinal plants, so he already had
some experience at sea and some familiarity with some of
their destinations. Balmas was also experienced at administering vaccines. He
had been one of the foremost vaccinators in Madrid. He
had also translated French physician Jacques Louis Moreau de la

(02:10):
Starts Historical and Practical Treatise on the Vaccine into Spanish,
and in addition to carrying the vaccine to the America's,
this voyage would also carry Spanish language copies of this
book to distribute to health authorities while they were there.
The expedition's goals were to deliver the vaccine to the
Spanish colonies, to train local personnel to administer the vaccine,

(02:34):
preserve the lymph and keep the program going over time,
and to establish a vaccine board at each stop that
would keep records about who had been vaccinated. Balmus His
team for the expedition included assistant director Jose Salvani, along
with other surgeons, nurses, and practitioners. The only woman aboard
was Isabelle de Zendala Egomez, who was the rectoress of

(02:57):
the Cassada Expositos, or the found House in La Coruna, Spain.
Her name is presented and spelled multiple different ways in
records of the day, so there's some fuzziness there. She
was the person who was ultimately responsible for the care
of twenty two boys between the ages of three and nine,

(03:19):
four of them from the foundling house that she was
the rectress of and the rest of them from a
charity hospital in La Coruna. One of these boys was
Benito Vallez, who Isabel had adopted. Here are the names
of the other twenty whose names we actually know, along
with their ages. When the voyage arrived in Mexico Juan
Francisco and Francisco Antonio aged nine, Andre's Naya age eight,

(03:44):
Vicente Ferraire, Antonio Verredia, Candido and Geronimo Maria aged seven,
Clemente Domingo, Nio, Jose, Manuel Maria and Jacinto aged six,
Francisco Florencio and Juan Antonio aged five, and Pascual and
Niceto Martin Thomas Metiton, Jose, Jorge, Nicolas de la Dolores,

(04:06):
Manuel Maria Jose and Vicente Marl Salle Velito, all of
whom were aged three. As far as we knew, all
of these boys had either been orphaned or abandoned by
their birth parents, and the way these foundling houses and
charity hospitals worked in Spain was that abandoned or orphaned

(04:26):
infants would be brought to them, and after they'd been processed,
they would be placed with a wet nurse in the community,
who would be paid a small stipend for her work.
Older children were sometimes placed with foster families, but often
they lived in poverty. For the children selected for this voyage,
though King Carlos the Fourth promised special protection and an

(04:49):
education at the government's expense once they arrived in Mexico,
as well as employment once they were old enough to work,
so in terms of what they were promised when they
were star out, it was going to be a long
sea voyage followed by a life that was supposed to
be better than what they were experiencing in Spain. Originally,

(05:09):
this voyage had been planned for a larger ship, but
it ultimately took place aboard a corvette called the Maria
Pita under the command of Pedro de Barco. A corvette
was faster than a frigate, but it's smaller size naturally
presented some challenges over the course of the voyage. The
boys were going to be vaccinated in pairs every nine
or ten days, just in case one of the vaccines

(05:32):
didn't take, but this also meant that there would always
be two boys on board with an itchy cow pox
blister who were living and playing with twenty other boys
in very confined quarters. Since anything from scratching to rolling
over in your sleep could damage the blister, and rough
housing could potentially lead a child to be infected with

(05:53):
the cow pox by accident, Isabelle Desendala had to keep
a careful watch on these kids at all times. This
sounds like the worst assignment on earth to me, but
crazed her for doing it. Boma's immunized the first two
boys in the chain, using limp for people he had
previously immunized in Spain, and then the Maria Pita set

(06:17):
sail on November three. They stopped first in the Canary
Islands off the northwest coast of Africa to distribute the
vaccine there, and then from there they sailed for Puerto Rico,
where they arrived on February ninth, eighteen o four. This
trans atlantic crossing was difficult, as any trans atlantic crossing

(06:39):
was likely to be at this point. By the time
they got to Puerto Rico, many of the children had
developed scurvy, and one of them had actually died from it.
And this is the one child whose name was not
recorded when they got to Mexico, so we don't know
what his name was. Balma is expected to be welcomed
in Puerto Rico with excitement and relief. As we noted

(06:59):
in Part one, the monarch had sent instructions to all
of the Spanish colonies to expect the expedition and to
prepare for its arrival, but to balmuss surprise, the vaccine
had already been introduced to Puerto Rico. So, like other
parts of the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico had been trying
to control a smallpox outbreak, and military surgeon Francisco oh

(07:21):
Year heard that the vaccine had already been introduced to
the nearby island of St. Thomas, which at the time
was part of the Danish West Indies. There are several
possible ways that the vaccine got to St. Thomas. This
is one of the many rabbit holes I went down
that I alluded to in Part one that kept this
from being just a single, one part episode. St. Thomas

(07:45):
had been under British control in eighteen o one and
eighteen o two, and at that point Brittain had started
vaccinating at Sailors. The Danish Royal Institute for Vaccination had
also sent vaccine samples to the Danish West Indians in
eighteen o two, and John Johnston, who was a physician,
had brought the vaccine from continental North America to the

(08:06):
island of Saint Croix in eighteen o three. It likely
spread to other Caribbean islands from there. I mean a
lot of these islands are close enough together that regardless
of who controlled it in terms of colonies, people went
among them all the time, regardless of which of these
was the source of vaccine in St. Thomas. When all
Year heard about its existence there, he asked them to

(08:27):
send samples. The first ones he got had no effect
when he tried to use them, but his second attempt worked.
Even though Governor Ramon de Castro knew that the expedition
was on its way, he thought that the situation in
Puerto Rico was too dire to wait around for it,
so he instructed Ollier to start distributing the vaccine widely. However,

(08:48):
the governor did insist that his administration do everything they
could to make sure the expedition's time in Puerto Rico
went smoothly to avoid ruffling any feathers for having taken
This initiative did not work at all. Bomas took the
existing vaccine program in Puerto Rico really badly. A lot

(09:09):
of colonial accounts about this expedition really described him as
being arrogant and stubborn. This included writing off local health
authorities as ignorant and inexperienced, even if they had already
conceived and implemented an entire vaccination program on their own
before he got there. In Puerto Rico, this led to

(09:29):
a prolonged dispute and which Bombas tried to publicly undermine
what oh Year had done and claimed that the vaccine
that oh Year was using was ineffective since oh Year
had already vaccinated more than fire people at this point.
This was a problem. Also in the window between when
the vaccine was introduced to Puerto Rico and when Balmas arrived,

(09:51):
people had been so excited about vaccines that children literally
vaccinated each other as a game, so some of Balmas's
concern earns about effacacy were probably pretty well founded. So
Bombas pointed out a couple of cases in which someone
who OH Year had vaccinated later developed smallpox or developed
a cow pox store after being re vaccinated by someone

(10:15):
from the expedition. It is likely this really happened because
things are not a hundred percent effective. All Year, on
the other hand, noted that these were outliers and that
the vast majority of people who were re vaccinated after
the expedition arrived had no reaction to that vaccine at all,
so their earlier vaccine had presumably been effective. Both the

(10:38):
governor and oh Year were sent lengthy correspondence back to
Spain describing a lot of hostility and arrogance on bombas part. Overall,
as you have just heard, this first Shop in the
America's did not go well for the expedition. They spent
four weeks in Puerto Rico, and although they administered vaccines,
they did not set up a vaccine board to keep

(10:59):
standardized records for the program. Then they faced a prolonged
wait for favorable winds before they could sit sail again,
and it took so long that they had to seek
out additional unvaccinated children to bring on board with them
to keep that chain going. Even then, by the time
they finally made landfall again in Venezuela, they had no

(11:19):
unvaccinated children remaining on board and only one cow pox
store that was ready to produce vaccine. The expedition nearly
failed at this point, something Balma's squarely blamed entirely on
Puerto Rico. However, the chain was not broken at this point.
Bomas's team was able to vaccinate twenty eight children and

(11:40):
Puerto Cabello, Venezuela before they moved on. You know, talk
about where the expedition went from there after a quick
sponsor break, The Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition hoped to vaccinate
as many people as possible, establishing tracking and record keeping

(12:04):
procedures that would allow vaccination programs to continue in Spain's
colonies long into the future after the expedition was over.
So to that end, they vaccinated people, most often children,
at every city where they stopped. Often people from outlying
villages would bring a child or children to have them vaccinated,
and then returned to continue vaccinations in the place they

(12:26):
had come from nine or ten days later, or a
few expedition members would carry the vaccine to a more
outlying community. At various points, they also tried vaccinating cows,
hoping to establish a natural reservoir of cow pox in
the Americas for the future use. This did not work

(12:47):
though cows. However, after they made multiple stops in Venezuela,
it quickly became clear that all of this was really
just too big of a job for one team, so
Ball to split the expedition in half, with him directing
one team and Jose Salvani directing the other. Salvanni's team
traveled south farther into the continent of South America, while

(13:10):
Balmas set sail again, this time bound for Cuba. Each
had Venezuelan boys to act as vaccine hosts, and the
boys who had originally set sail from Spain all remained
with Balmas, Although those twenty two boys are the ones
most often mentioned in the context of this expedition, Local
children also worked as vaccine carriers after the expedition arrived

(13:33):
in the America's Sometimes they were recruited from local families
and then returned later on, and sometimes they were enslaved.
Salvanni's team had the more perilous journey after the expedition split.
The South American landscape is highly varied and often extremely treacherous,
and a lot of their route went through mountains and rainforests.

(13:55):
As they vaccinated people for smallpox, they faced tropical illnesses themselves.
They started out following the Magdalena River, but their ship
was wrecked in what's now Colombia not long after they
set sail. They were sheltered by the local indigenous people,
who Salvanese team vaccinated. As they salvaged their ship and

(14:16):
tried to get ready to go again. They got to Cartagena,
which was then known as Cartagena to India's on four.
After vaccinating at least two thousand people, they again split
into two groups, each heading in a different direction through Colombia,
before rendezvousing at Santa Fe de Bogota. Salvanni became seriously

(14:37):
ill during this expedition, contracting tuberculosis and losing his vision
in one eye, which might have been a result of
the tuberculosis, or it could have been some other infection.
It's a little unclear. One of Salvani's major stumbling blocks
happened when they got to Lima, Peru. It turned out
that the vaccine had already made its way to Lima

(14:59):
thanks to the Vicetroy of Buenos Aires. And although this
was not the first time that the expedition reached a
place only to find that the vaccine was already there,
it was the first time that local authorities just did
not want to adopt the expedition's procedures for administration and
tracking at all. Vaccinations had become a for profit business

(15:20):
in Lima, and local doctors didn't want to lose a
potential source of their income. The expeditions procedures were only
adopted after a new viceroy in Lima supported them. Salvanni's
leg of the expedition went on for seven years, moving
through and sailing around South America before returning to Spain.
Salvanni did not make the return voyage home, though he

(15:42):
died in Bolivia in eighteen ten, to return to Bombas
in the other half of the expedition, he vaccinated roughly
twelve thousand people in Venezuela before departing for Cuba, taking
four enslaved boys with him to act as vaccine hosts,
and once he got there it turned out once again
that the vaccine had already been introduced. Medical authorities in

(16:05):
Cuba had been trying to get the vaccine, but their
intentional efforts had all failed. For example, vials of lymph
that were sent from Philadelphia were unsurprisingly not effective anymore
by the time they got to Cuba. But then, in
eighteen o four, a woman named Dona Maria b was
Demente left Puerto Rico bound for Cuba the day after

(16:26):
her son and two maids had been vaccinated. Their vaccine
sites were ready to be propagated shortly after their arrival.
Was just sort of a coincidence that she wound up
in Cuba with ready to harvest vaccine. As the Cuban
authorities were trying to do that. Dr Thomas Roma Chacon

(16:47):
used the lymph to start his own vaccination campaign, so
by the time Balmas arrived, thousands of people had already
been vaccinated. Many of Romay's recipients were enslaved Africans who
did not have the freedom to refuse it. This did
not go quite as poorly as the expedition's visit to
Puerto Rico had. Bomas seems to have approached the situation

(17:08):
in Cuba with like less overt hostility to the local authorities.
This may have been because Romi took the step of
demonstrating that his vaccines had been effective by vary elating
his own sons, who he had vaccinated himself. They had
no reaction to this exposure to smallpox. Bomas did implement

(17:30):
the expedition standardized process for establishing a vaccine board and
for keeping records in Cuba, something he had not actually
done back in Puerto Rico. After leaving Cuba, Balmas went
to Mexico, arriving in Vera Cruz and finding unexpectedly that
there was no one waiting to be vaccinated, because once again,

(17:51):
a vaccination program had already been established before he got there.
The Ayantamiento, or Governing Council, had implemented a huge program
pleet with registration and tracking, and sending vaccine delegations to
outlying areas. Balma's was once again at risk of breaking
his vaccine chain, but ten men were conscripted from the

(18:12):
Garrison Regiment to act as hosts. These existing vaccine programs
made Bomas's time in Mexico particularly challenging. He did make
arrangements for the boys who had traveled from Spain. They
were to be housed in Mexico City. They were placed
in the care of the bishop, and they started out
living at a charitable institution that actually wasn't that much

(18:33):
different from what they had left in Spain. They were though,
given academic and religious instruction while they were there, but
most or possibly all of them were eventually adopted, mostly
by teachers, merchants, and doctors. But when it came to
administering vaccines, Balma's had a lot of trouble finding people
who had not been vaccinated yet. In Mexico City, he

(18:56):
almost lost his source again, but then the mayor brought
in a twenty indigenous children and their mothers who were
described as needing quote much persuasion in Balmus's words, quote
some admitted that it was right, but that they could
not pay, and every single one went to the apothecary
demanding an antidote against the venom that had just been

(19:16):
introduced into the arm of her child. Yeah, a lot
of Balmas's expedition staff just does not seem to have
taken that lesson to heart, uh, that that Jose Flores
had talked about, like don't traumatize people while you are
doing this. They seem to have taken a much heavier
and more aggressive hand A lot of time. Later on,

(19:37):
some children from a foundling home that the expedition had
vaccinated became ill, and while this illness was initially blamed
on Bomas's vaccine, a board of doctors was convened and
he was cleared from all suspicion. On top of all
these challenges, Bomas himself was very ill. He had developed
dysentery and what he believed was yellow fever. En route

(20:00):
from Cuba to Mexico, Balmus continued westward through Mexico. In
Wahaka he established vaccine boards and a plan for vaccinating
the indigenous community situated outside the city. Once he reached
the western coast of Mexico, he procured a ship to
continue onto the Philippines. Meanwhile, on May eighteen o four,

(20:21):
the first smallpox vaccine was administered in Guatemala, using vaccine
that had been brought from Havana. Bombas faced a series
of delays when he was trying to leave Mexico. The
ship that he was supposed to board was full, and
he and the expedition were denied passage. Rather than waiting
for another vessel, are really waiting longer for another vessel?

(20:44):
He traveled over Land's Acapulco, setting sail from there in
February of eighteen o five aboard the Maggayanas. He had
a new group of twenty five children on board. Most
of them were children from Mexico whose parents were compensated
for their participation Shan. These children were to be returned
to Mexico after this leg of the expedition was over.

(21:06):
They were once again in the care of Isabel desnsale
A Gomez, who remained on board even though her contract
had only been for the trip to Mexico. Conditions on
the Magayanas were much worse than they had been on
the way to the America's from Spain, though they were
very overcrowded, the ship was generally pretty filthy. Was a

(21:28):
situation where he traveled to another port of departure and
got a different ship because he didn't want to wait
as long as he would have had to otherwise. But
there are accommodations were not great, and again two dozen
kids crammed into that yes with two of them at
a time, having a cow pox store that has to

(21:50):
be carefully monitored. Balmas's team vaccinated and estimated twenty thou
people in the Philippines and established a vaccine board before
continue going on to Macao, which is part of China
today but at that point it was a Portuguese colony.
Since this was a short trip, he needed only three
children to carry the vaccine. From Macau, they traveled to

(22:12):
other parts of China. Authorities in Canton, which was controlled
by the Spanish Royal Philippine Company, refused to cooperate with
the expedition, so Balmus instead took the vaccine to the
British East India Company. They rounded Africa and stopped at
the British island of Saint Helena on the way back
to Spain, where they arrived in July of eighteen oh six,

(22:33):
having circumnavigated the globe. After this expedition, Bomas was appointed
Spain's Inspector General of the Vaccine. Sometime around eighteen o
eight or eighteen o nine, during the Peninsular War, French
forces sacked his house in Madrid. That was probably when
his personal journals that detailed this expedition were lost. His

(22:55):
personality seems to have been unchanged during this time. He
express repeated frustrations that he was not getting enough correspondence
from Salvanni about his progress, which was still ongoing through
South America at this point. These frustrations were in spite
of the fact that warfare was slowing down the mail

(23:17):
from South America back to Europe. He also accused Subody
of being intentionally slow in all of this, even though
he was covering an enormous amount of difficult to reign
during these years of the expedition, Balmas sounds real crabby.
In eighteen o nine, Balma's returned to Mexico to evaluate

(23:38):
the situation check in on vaccine boards re established lymph
supplies where they had been lost, and trying to find
a local source of cowpox if the human to human
chain should break again. He was still there when the
Mexican War of Independence started. He got back to Spain
in eighteen thirteen. He was King Fernando the seventh Chamber Surgeon.

(23:59):
In an eighteen six team, he was elected to the
Royal Academy of Medicine. Balmus died in Madrid on February twelve,
eighteen nineteen, at the age of sixty five. We will
talk about the impact and the legacy of this expedition
after another quick sponsor break. In a way, the Royal

(24:23):
Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition is one giant contradiction. Smallpox only existed
in the America's because Europeans introduced it there, either through
their own bodies or through the bodies of enslaved Africans
who had no choice in all of this. And this
effort to control smallpox was only possible because Spain had

(24:45):
already developed such a massive colonial administrative state, with methods
of communication and payment and organization all ready to go.
So this expedition essentially approached a serious life or death,
probably them by building on the source of that problem.
It used of bureaucracy that had exploited and subjugated, and

(25:07):
in some cases forcibly converted indigenous peoples to then offer
them the vaccine to an illness that they had introduced. Also,
as we noted in Part one, although King Carlos the
Fourth had some humanitarian goals with this expedition, parts of
it also rested on exploitation. In some places, enslavers tried

(25:28):
to protect their investments and productivity by seeking out vaccines
for their enslaved workforce who had no autonomy over their
own bodies and did not have the freedom to consent
to this vaccine. And on the enslaver's part, this wasn't
just about productivity. It was also about racism and the
racist idea that people of African descent were dirty or

(25:48):
we're breeding disease. Over time, this idea spread to free
people who were living in poverty as well, and mass
vaccination campaigns targeted poor people by force. Many many aspects
of the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition would just not hold
up today in terms of everything for medical ethics, to
vaccine safety to general human rights issues. Just focusing on

(26:13):
those children who acted as carriers. There were sixty two
of them known to have participated during the course of
the expedition. Four of them died as a result of
their involvement. Um we didn't specifically say before the break,
but those children that were supposed to be returned to
Mexico were returned to Mexico the fact that their parents

(26:33):
had been compensated to send them on a voyage where
they would act as human hosts for a vaccine. I mean,
that's not a thing that would probably be done today
fingers crossed. Uh. But at the same time, taking all
of that into consideration, this was a pretty colossal achievement.
It's hard to tell just how colossal, though. Estimates of

(26:54):
how many people the expedition directly immunized are all over
the place. You'll find numbers anywhere for one thousand to
three hundred thousand people. But the whole point was to
establish vaccine programs that would continue after the expedition had
moved on, and it's hard to tell exactly how many
people that affected. Even though the expedition established record keeping

(27:15):
procedures in most of the places it visited, many of
those records have since been lost through changes in colonial administration,
revolutions and wars, and really local responses to the vaccine
were all over the place. Some cities and towns held
parades to welcome the arrival of the vaccine, and people
eagerly awaited their turn, while others practically revolted at the idea.

(27:39):
In Wahaka, for example, a mandatory vaccine program was ended
after five years because of an uprising against it. In
some places, the vaccine programs the Expedition established kept going
in spite of all of that, and in some cases
they lasted for decades or even more than a century.
But maintaining an arm to arm source of a vaccine

(28:01):
is actually really hard. You want to vaccinate everyone because
you want to eliminate smallpox, but at the same time
you need enough people who aren't already vaccinated to continue
to act as vaccine hosts. So in Mexico City, for example,
this led to a whole process to try to ensure
that a hundred and sixty four children every year, preferably babies,

(28:24):
were left unvaccinated. The responsibility for selecting these children was
then divided up among the different wards of the city.
This just to me seems like failure waiting to happen. Yes,
there are so many layers of not okay to this onion.
On top of the complexity of keeping the chain going,

(28:45):
a lot of people just didn't want to Getting a
smallpox vaccine this way was painful. The cow pox store
was itchy and gross, and having the lymph harvested nine
or ten days later was also painful. Sometimes parents just
didn't bring their children back for that second visit, or
they hid their children when authorities were going house to house.

(29:05):
There was also a lot of resistance to the vaccine
in general, some of it justified, but some of it
based on intentional anti vaccine misinformation. Compounding all of this,
a lot of officials were just not good at calming
the fears of anxious children and their families, and instead
treated everybody who was scared as though they were ignorant

(29:26):
and backward. Spanish health officials, whether they had been born
in Spain or in the colonies, often did not approach
indigenous or African people with any kind of cultural sensitivity
or basic respect. So unsurprisingly, these kinds of efforts eventually
broke down in most places, leading health officials to look

(29:46):
for other sources of vaccine to start up again. Another
complication involved with this was the realization that the vaccine
did not confer lifetime immunity to smallpox as people had
believed it did when it was first introduced. So many
places that still had vaccine programs going a couple of
decades after the expedition had to adjust their procedures to

(30:07):
revaccinate people as their immunity wore off. When guadmal and
doctor Jose Flores had been asked to advise on how
to introduce the smallpox vaccine to the America's he had
praised the cow pox based vaccine as the quote easy
and safe method to eradicate smallpox and forever liberate the
inhabitants of those lands from the most frightening contagions. But obviously,

(30:33):
although this campaign unquestionably save lives, it did not eradicate smallpox.
Although many of the vaccine programs that were implemented through
this expedition tried to be thorough, it really really takes
a coordinated, truly global effort to eradicate a disease entirely.

(30:53):
The idea of herd immunity was not really articulated until
the early twentieth century. So long after this was over,
So the idea that there was sort of a target
percentage of vaccinated people who would protect everyone was just
not part of all this planning. So even after the expedition, outbreaks,
some of them serious, continued to happen all over the

(31:16):
Spanish Empire. As one example, Spain seeded the Philippines to
the United States after the Spanish American War, and in
the interest of protecting American soldiers from the disease, the U. S.
Army started a vaccination program in the Philippines in nineteen hundred.
Army officials reported that anywhere from a quarter to a
third of the people reporting to vaccine clinics had already

(31:38):
had smallpox, actual smallpox, not cowpox as a vaccine. One
reason was that the outlying areas relied on getting vaccine
LIMP from the Central Board in Manila, and in some
places those supplies were disrupted for years at a time.
Smallpox was eradicated from South America in nineteen seventy one,

(31:59):
so that was more than a hundred and sixty years
after the expedition. It was declared eradicated worldwide in nine eight,
So today most people don't get a smallpox vaccine. Those
who do were generally in rolls, like being a member
of the military, people who would be at the most
risk of exposure in the event of a bio terror attack. Also,

(32:20):
thanks to manufacturing and refrigeration and preservation technologies, the smallpox
vaccines that exist today do not require this arm to
arm chain of human hosts. Obviously, they are much safer
than they were in the nineteenth century. If you'd like
to read a fictionalized version of this, you can check
out the novel Saving the World that is by author

(32:41):
Julia Alvarez. This is also the second time one of
Julia Alvarez's novels has come up on the show. We
also talked about her novel In the Time of the
Butterflies in our episode on the Mirraball Sisters. Yeah, I
read Saving the World when it very first came out.
At that time, I was freelancing as a book reviewer

(33:01):
as a side gig um, and that's actually where I
first learned about this whole expedition because it's a first person,
uh not first person, it's a it's a fictional account
focusing on Isabel as one of the main characters, and
like her relationship with these boys who were in her care. Um,
and the whole time I was reading, I was like
this real, a real human to human chain of children

(33:24):
that was many years ago. So um. I do not
remember a lot of detail about the book, but I
do remember reading it. Do you got some listener mail?
I do have listener mail. Uh. This listener mail is
from Lucy and it follows our Unearthed year ends that
came out at the very beginning of Also, before I
read it, I just wanted to say thank you to

(33:47):
everyone who has sent us pictures of their knitting I have.
I have replied to a lot of those folks to
say thank you because they've been great, great pictures. But
thanks to everybody who has done that. So Lucy sent
this email. Lucy said, I an avid listener of the
show and always love Unearthed. This time, however, I was
so excited to hear the story of the missing song
from the Muppet Christmas Carol. It's my favorite Christmas movie,

(34:09):
and I sat down to watch it on Christmas Eve
this year since I was feeling a little blue because
you know, just as when Love Is Gone should have
played but didn't. Something in my nearly thirty year old
brain that has watched the film as many times if
not more, said wait a minute, where's that song? I
thought I was losing my mind. I was especially confused

(34:30):
as I had watched it on a relatively new large
plus streaming service. Not sure if you can reference that
by name, and there was no reason to cut for
time on a TV broadcast. Turns out the DVD version
must have made its way to that plus streaming service.
Thanks for proving that I was in fact not imagining
an entire song from the film, and thanks for everything
you do on the show. I have really enjoyed it

(34:52):
for many years. I've attached a picture of my dog
Cole for no other reason than I know you guys
typically like to receive fun pet photo. Thanks Lucy. Thanks
Lucy for the email and for the picture of Coal.
We've gotten several um sort of different variations on the
same theme of the song when Love Is Gone uh
from the Muppet Christmas Carol um. My understanding is that

(35:17):
the master that they were going to be reused for
like the four K remaster, had been found, but they
were not sure as of when it was reported whether
it was going to be ready to actually broadcast in time.
For the Christmas holiday. But we've also heard from lots
of people and like various configurations of recordings of the

(35:39):
Muppet Christmas Carol that they have and whether they do
or do not include the song when Love Is Gone. Um.
I think I saw one this morning where somebody said
they had both a full screen and a wide screen version,
and in full screen the song is there, but in
wide screen the song is not. Um. So anyway, that's

(36:00):
the ongoing saga of the missing song. UM. Thank you again,
Lucy for sending this email. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, where
History Podcast at I heart radio dot com and we
are all over social media and missed in History. That's
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you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast and

(36:22):
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Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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