Francisco Javier Balmis

Francisco Javier Balmis
Bust of Francisco Javier Balmis at the Faculty of Medicine of the UMH in San Juan de Alicante

Francisco Javier de Balmis y Berenguer (Alicante, December 2, 1753 – Madrid, February 12, 1819) was a Spanish military surgeon and physician, honorary member of the court of King Charles IV. He led the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, also known as the Balmis Expedition.

Biography

Born in Alicante on December 2, 1753, in what was then called the Plaza de la Fruta (today the Plaza de la Santísima Faz), he was the son and grandson of surgeons. Balmis finished his secondary studies at the age of seventeen and began his medical career at the King's Military Hospital in Alicante, where he served as a practitioner alongside the chief surgeon for five years. In 1778 he obtained the title of surgeon in Valencia. Years later he moved to Havana and, later still, to Mexico City. In Mexico City he graduated in Arts and served as first surgeon at the Hospital of San Juan de Dios. There he was able to study remedies for venereal diseases (today called sexually transmitted infections), which would later serve him in publishing the Tratado de las virtudes del agave y la begonia (Madrid, 1794).

Back in Spain, he graduated as an external student (without attending classes) with a Bachelor of Medicine from the Royal University of Toledo in 1798. He went on to become "chamber surgeon" to Charles IV. He persuaded the King to send an expedition to America to spread the recently discovered smallpox vaccine. Balmis and José Salvany were the soul of the expedition, together with the nurse Isabel Zendal, who was in charge of supervising the children carrying the virus. The expedition set out from the port of La Coruña on November 30, 1803, aboard the corvette María Pita. From there it traveled to San Juan de Puerto Rico, La Guaira, Puerto Cabello, Caracas, Havana, Mérida, Veracruz and Mexico City. The vaccine reached places as distant as Texas in the north and New Granada in the south. Although not Balmis himself, other members of his expedition, among them Doctor Salvany, carried the vaccine to South America, as far as Chiloé, in the present-day Republic of Chile, at that time the southernmost territory under Spanish rule on the Pacific.

In Mexico City, Balmis had difficulty convincing the Viceroy José de Iturrigaray, but in the end he and his son were vaccinated.

In September 1805 Balmis sailed aboard the Magallanes from the port of Acapulco to Manila, capital of the Philippines, and in 1806 he returned to Spain. On his return voyage he still spread the vaccine in Macao and Canton (China) and on the island of Saint Helena, an English possession in the South Atlantic. He would return to New Spain once again in 1810.

He wrote Instrucción sobre la introducción y conservación de la vacuna, and translated from French a work on the same subject, the Tratado histórico-práctico by Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe.

Doctor Miguel Muñoz preserved and distributed the vaccine in Mexico until 1844, when his son Luis took charge of the project. After Luis Muñoz, Doctor Luis Malanco was in charge, and in this way the lives of tens of thousands of American children could be saved.

Legacy

His name has remained linked to the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition—also known as the "Balmis Expedition" in his honor—which he carried out to the Spanish possessions of America and the Philippines to spread the smallpox vaccine, a milestone in the history of medicine.

In 2020 the Spanish Ministry of Defense named the military deployment to fight the COVID-19 pandemic "Operation Balmis."

The General Hospital of his city, Alicante, has borne the name "Hospital General Universitario de Alicante Doctor Balmis" since December 27, 2021, when the President of the Generalitat Valenciana Ximo Puig announced the change of name.

In fiction

The American writer of Dominican descent Julia Álvarez devoted her third novel to the Balmis expedition: Saving the World (2006), Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. ISBN 9781565125100

The Planeta Prize winner Javier Moro tells the story of the expedition and its protagonists in novelistic form in his book A flor de piel (2015), ISBN 9788432224942.

Televisión Española produced a television film about the Balmis expedition in 2016, titled 22 ángeles, directed by Miguel Bardem and with Pedro Casablanc in the role of Balmis.

In 2021 Correos issued a stamp dedicated to Francisco Javier de Balmis y Berenguer.

Gallery

• 
  Begonia balmisiana, engraving by José Rubio, illustration from Balmis's treatise Demostración de las eficaces virtudes nuevamente descubiertas en las raíces de dos plantas de Nueva España, especies de ágave y de begonia..., Madrid, Imprenta de la viuda de Ibarra, 1794.
• 
  American agave or maguey with details of the flower, pistil, calyx, stamen, and a portion of the root, engraving by José Rubio for the Demostración de las eficaces virtudes nuevamente descubiertas... (Madrid: 1794).

External links

• Balaguer Perigüell, Emilio (2018). "Francisco Javier Balmis Berenguer". Diccionario Biográfico Español (in español). Real Academia de la Historia.
• Website of the Balmis Foundation
• Biographical documentary about Doctor Balmis, Director of the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition
• Francisco Xavier Balmis in the Virtual Library of Polygraphs of the Ignacio Larramendi Foundation
• Images of Demostracion de las eficaces virtudes neuvamente descubiertas en las raices de dos plantas de Nueva-España, especies e ágave ye de begónias (Madrid: 1794) digitized by the John Carter Brown Library