It will soon be two years Josefa Perez appreciated what Andy Warhol called the fifteen minutes of fame we all deserve. And in his case it was with all the reasons in the world. On December 27, 2020, that 89-year-old pensioner residing in the center of Feixa Llarga de l’Hospitalet de Llobregat she was the first citizen of Catalonia to receive the covid vaccine.
That day we still lived with our hearts in our hands, terrified of a disease that had paralyzed everything, but a ray of hope seemed to begin to indicate the end of the tunnel. The health personnel assured us that those injections would help us defeat that cursed virus, but not everyone saw it clearly. Some denied it, others were skeptical, and some turned to history as a reminder that other diseases had already been eradicated through this method.
Now that they have passed two years from the start of the vaccination campaign and that souvenir doses are given, on the History Train we pay homage to those who have been on the front line: the social and health personnel who we applauded with emotion at the time and who we have now forgotten. And above all we want to remember the pioneers who two centuries ago thought that the vaccine would be a good way to save lives. Furthermore, we have the privilege of doing it with professionals of the highest level.
The origin of the word vaccine
For example, the doctor Magda Campins – epidemiology specialist and member of the health department’s vaccine advisory council – explains how after years of observation, Edward Jenner he realized that the women who milked the cows did not get smallpox. His theory was that they were immune because they had been infected with a variant of that disease that affects ruminants. Therefore, Jenner thought that if everyone submitted to controlled infection processthey would avoid contracting the human variant.
In 1796 he moved from theory to action and began experimenting by inoculating some individuals with bovine pus and observing them carefully for two years. After that time, he verified that after a small initial reaction they hadn’t gotten sick. Analyzed the data, in 1798 he published the results of the survey which he baptized as “smallpox vaccine” and which was soon popularly known as vaccine (because it usually came from cows).
The smallpox It was a disease of great concern (it killed 400,000 Europeans every year), which explains why doctors immediately began to imitate the procedure invented by Jenner. In Paris, his main supporter was the doctor Francois Colon. The first thing she did was vaccinate her 11-month-old son without anything happening to him. Enthusiastic, he promoted the massive use of this technique and vaccinated the poor for free. Columbus had a good friend Puigcerdà called Francesc Piguillem Verdacer, who had studied medicine in Cervera. As the president of the Center de Recerca de Cerdanya, Enric Quílez explains very well, the fact of practicing his profession in a frontier site like Puigcerdà made it easier for him to keep up to date with the latest scientific trends coming from the Gallic lands. In fact, it seems that the smallpox samples sent by Colon arrived by mail.
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Thanks to this, he became the first doctor in the Iberian peninsula to administer vaccines. It was December 3, 1800. The lucky ones were two children from Puigcerdà. The children’s mother and Dr. Piguillem decided to act with discretion to avoid criticism from city residents. But they didn’t count on the joy of the boys, who told everyone happy to know that they were protected from a disease which, if it didn’t kill you, could leave you blind or, in the best case scenario, burn your face with pustule marks. As Quílez explains, some people from Puigcerdà put their hands on their heads because just as now anti-vaccinators are defending astonishing theories, back then there were people who believed that vaccinated people would grow horns like cows.
Piguillem was not the only pioneer in our country. The doctor Miquel Brugueradirector of the academic studies unit of the College of Doctors of Barcelona, he tells us about the doctor’s case Jaume Ferran Clua, a man of science ahead of his time, who saved many lives with his unorthodox methods, which would have cost him his professional career. Surely if he had been American they would have already made a series of those that are now fashionable. For the moment, we have dedicated a part of our Historic Train to it.
