Isabel Zendal, the mother of all vaccines

On November 30, 1803, the ship set sail from the port of A Coruña. Maria Pita bound for America. Thus began the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition. His mission was to fight against the smallpox plague in the Spanish colonies in America and the Philippine islands, through a vaccine that would immunize their inhabitants.

The king Charles IV (1748-1819) sponsored this philanthropic expedition with public funds, probably sensitized by the death of the Infanta María Teresa (1791-1794) from smallpox, one of his fourteen descendants. The Court Physician Francisco Javier Balmis (1753-1819), led this humanitarian adventure that sought to massively vaccinate girls and boys throughout the then Spanish Empire.

In it Maria Pita Thirty-seven people were traveling. Among them were twenty-two orphaned children – all boys – between the ages of three and nine. Were human vaccines that they had to transport the recently discovered smallpox vaccine to the overseas territories.

These little ones had not passed the terrible disease: every nine or ten days, the disease was passed from a little arm with pus to that of another healthy child. They were accompanied by Isabel Zendal, the one in charge of caring for them and keeping them healthy and alive.

The Smallpox Vaccine: Edward Jenner and… Lady Montagu

Let us remember that smallpox was – I use the past tense because it is currently considered eradicated – a disease caused by smallpox virus. Its mortality rate reached 30% of infected patients.

In 1796 the British physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823) began an assay with pustule samples from the hand of a farmer infected with the cowpox virus. She inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of his gardener. The little boy reacted with some fever, but did not contract any infection. A few days later, the doctor pricked the boy several times again, this time with the variola virus. The child did not get sick.

This was the first stage of an investigation that Jenner continued with twenty-three other patients. In addition, she demonstrated that the protective cowpox pus could be inoculated from person to person, avoiding the use of cattle in the process.

After the appropriate verifications, in 1840 the British government prohibited the variolation –a practice originating in China and India in which powder of smallpox scabs was put on a cut made on the patient, something not without danger– to achieve immunity against the disease. The vaccine began to be provided free of charge.

Remember that, before Jenner, the also British lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762) observed during a trip to Turkey how the Circassian women who pricked themselves with needles soaked in bovine smallpox pus did not contract this disease. The traveling aristocrat inoculated her own son and, on her return to England, she repeated and publicized this procedure – variolation – among other people.

Lady Montagu found herself face to face with the medical guild, which paid little attention to this technique.

The other side of the philanthropic expedition

Francisco Javier Balmis directed with José Salvany and Leopard (1778-1810) the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, the first international health expedition.

This adventure needed, of course, the doctors in charge of administering the vaccines and the sailors who were in charge of transporting them. But let’s not forget other essential actors for its success: children.

These little ones came from different foundling houses – from the Casa de Desamparados in Madrid, from the Hospital de la Caridad in A Coruña and from Santiago. they were the vaccine, the means to transport the antidote without it deteriorating. Preserving his health and life was essential to the mission.

The person in charge of caring for them was the nurse (and rector of the Hospital de la Caridad in A Coruña) Isabel Zendal Gómez (1771-?). One of the children, nine-year-old Benito Vélez, was her son. It was also she who was in charge of the custody of the twenty-six children who traveled to the Philippines to carry the smallpox vaccine.

Unfortunately, very little is known of his life.

The mother of all vaccines

I learned about the story of Isabel Zendal through the journalist and documentarian Antonio López Mariño, who has dedicated years of research to recover the figure of this nurse. Antonio has received various awards for his work –The mother of all vaccines–, which was published in the form of a report in the A Coruña newspaper The opinion under the title of The rector Isabel, exposed (November 20, 2014).

In Isabel Zendal Gómez in the Archives of Galicia (Publications Service of the Galician Parliament, 2018) –which can be download in pdf format free of charge–, Antonio includes the facsimile documentation that is preserved in the Archives of Galicia on the life and work of the nurse.

There he introduces, by way of presentation, the mother of all vaccines thus:

He was born into a solemnly poor family, in a village in the municipality of Ordes. She emigrates to Coruña where, being a single mother, she will work as rector at the Casa de Expósitos. In November 1803, as part of the medical team of the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, she undertook a four-year transatlantic voyage that would give her the prestige of being the first nurse in history on an international public health mission.

He took care of the only essential link in the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition: the foundlings who, arm in arm, brought the first known vaccine to America and Asia – that of smallpox. An extraordinary life, from a very marginal origin to the highest peaks of oblivion. Isabel Zendal Gómez is an absolute unknown to her countrymen. For all of us.

Like so many other forgotten women, Isabel Zendal Gómez deserves her place in history. Without her care for the children who carried the smallpox antidote, this expedition – which until now has only remembered part of its protagonists – would not have come to fruition.