On February 12, 1804, at seven in the morning, an eight-year-old girl stood in the living room of Dr. don Tomás Romay. Her arm still throbbed, a slight if persistent hum that seemed to invite her touch. Involuntarily, she reached for the puckered spot, swollen into a great bubble on the soft flesh of her inner arm. The incision was made a week or so before, and news of it spread in Havana as quickly as the smallpox itself. The girl had only just arrived from Puerto Rico the day before. Yet here she was, waiting in the home of this strange man. He would soon pluck open her arm, draining it of the clear liquid the adults curiously coveted. The cut stung, but perhaps satisfyingly so, a welcome release after days of anticipation. The first doctor and the woman who enslaved the girl had prohibited her from rubbing her own skin. The delicate wound must be left to knit itself back together. Each wave aboard the ship threatened a misstep, one that might easily undo the vaccination.
But what had she known of smallpox? Did she understand that she was now protected from this disease for life? What snippets—offered in dulcet persuasions to the woman who owned her—might she have stolen to explain why her body grew such precious fruit? Now, in Cuba, this new doctor thrilled as he harvested her yield, grafting new furrows of it into his two sons. Romay published vignettes of this encounter as an experiment, and readers of the Papel Periódico de La Habana enjoyed a first-hand account of his makeshift medical trial, one he reported as having performed upon his own children. Describing each step in detail, the doctor invited the public to evaluate the efficacy of this new, miraculous technology.
Having convinced his peers, Romay used the fluid extracted from this one enslaved girl to vaccinate two hundred other children, including the sons and daughters of several prominent plantation owners, such as Manuel O’Farrill, Ignacio Pedroso, and Martin de Arostegui, who through political influence and wealth grew increasingly responsible for the public welfare of the island. These planters volunteered enslaved children from their estates to travel in and between the capital, fashioning a small network of child carriers, their bodies transformed into vessels that might save the island from future disaster. Through the calculus of the piezas de Indias, slaveholders may have valued enslaved children far less than their able-bodied elders, but their young flesh could still be put to work in the service of the Crown. Subtle allusions to these children, whose experiences with the vaccine are otherwise undocumented, suggest the extent to which enslaved peoples encountered experimental medicine beyond the formal purview of medical trials and the Protomedicato, the royal medical tribunal of the Spanish Empire.