Francisco Javier de Balmis

Francisco Javier de Balmis was a Spanish military surgeon and physician, born in Alicante in 1753 into a family of barber surgeons, who is remembered for leading the first international vaccination campaign. He trained at the military hospital of Alicante, served as a naval and army surgeon, and from 1786 worked in Mexico City, where he directed the venereal disease ward of the combined hospital of San Juan de Dios and San Andres and was admitted to the Real Academia Medica Matritense. During a leave in 1788 he studied Mexican plants and native remedies, publishing a treatise on agave and begonia in Madrid in 1794. As physician to King Charles IV he persuaded the Crown to send an expedition carrying the new smallpox vaccine to Spanish America, the Philippines and China, and he led the expedition that sailed from Spain in 1804. The vaccine travelled through Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico, reaching Texas in the north and New Granada in the south, and Balmis also wrote instructions on introducing and preserving the vaccine. He died in Madrid in 1819.