In these difficult days, in which the Covid-19 pandemic has changed our lives and half the world is searching for a vaccine to confront this disease, we would like to recall how the immunization system was first introduced in Spain.
The person responsible for this great advance was the physician Francisco Piguillem Verdacer who, following Edward Jenner’s experiments, inoculated four children from Puigcerdà in December 1800 with lymph brought from Paris, so that they would develop immunity to the virus, thus paving the way for the vaccine.
The document that best records these events is Piguillem’s work “La vacuna en España ó cartas familiares sobre esta nueva inoculación: escritas a la señora.” This work, published in 1814, brings together the letters that the author wrote to the mother of one of these first vaccinated children, in which he describes the events, the procedure, and a brief history of smallpox and the vaccination introduced by Edward Jenner.
Despite criticism and reproaches from some detractors of this new practice, Piguillem continued to spread vaccination throughout Catalonia and the rest of the country, translated François Colon’s “Essai sur l’innoculation de la vaccine”, and was appointed Professor of Medicine at the Medical-Practical Academy of Barcelona.
In addition to a copy of the aforementioned work, the Uriach Foundation also preserves a set of manuscripts dated 1826 containing lecture notes by Piguillem on Pyretology, Medical Philosophy, Ideology, and Classification of Medicines, recorded by his students.