Maternal Judgments - (Diálogos) by Allyson M Poska (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Maternal Judgments examines the role of race and gender in the responses to the world's first vaccination campaign, helmed by the Spanish Crown in the early nineteenth century.

In 1796 the English physician Edward Jenner promoted the use of cowpox to provide immunity against smallpox, making it the first vaccine in human history. Soon after, the Spanish monarchy extended the vaccine to its global empire. Using mostly orphaned boys as carriers, the Royal Philanthropic Expedition transported the vaccine from Spain to the Americas and the Philippines. At the same time, the king opened vaccination rooms across Spain, and individual doctors sought the vaccine from other sources. As the Crown decided not to make vaccination compulsory, the success of this multifaceted vaccination campaign relied on convincing mothers to have themselves, their children, and their dependents vaccinated.

Maternal Judgments follows the vaccination campaign around the globe, examining the gendered strategies used to persuade women of all races and classes of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and the complicated responses of the women who were some of the first mothers in history to decide whether to have their children vaccinated.

Review Quotes

"Maternal Judgments introduces readers to some of the unknown, unsung women who labored on behalf of cowpox vaccine in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. Hailing from every caste and class background, these women were mothers, caretakers, promoters, and occasionally practitioners of a novel preventive technique. Considering the importance of women as healers in the early modern world, we need more such approaches to public health in a global perspective. In the hands of Allyson Poska, their stories illuminate worlds beyond, including the experiences of single women in Spain and female transatlantic migration. In short, Maternal Judgments stands to make contributions to the study of women and gender, the history of medicine and the Spanish Empire, and histories of childhood, as the book thoughtfully unfolds the roles that children played as carriers of the vaccine lymph in their bodies."--Paul Ramírez, author of Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason

"A significant contribution to the history of medicine and empire. . . . Poska shifts attention from traditional narratives of scientific progress to examine the gendered dimensions of Spain's Royal Vaccination Expedition. By recovering the experiences of women and children who served as vaccine carriers and local intermediaries, she argues that their participation--often negotiated under conditions of coercion--proved fundamental to the campaign's implementation across Spanish territories in the early nineteenth century."--Martha Few, author of For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala

About the Author

Allyson M. Poska is a professor emerita of history at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her most recent book is Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire, which was awarded the Best Book Prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.