Isabel Zendal, the first nurse in history to be sent on an international mission
4/29/2020
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(La imagen de Isabal Zendal es de Ramón Palmeral 2018)
We remember the story of this Galician woman,
whose role was fundamental in the vaccination against smallpox of
hundreds of thousands of people in the 19th century, and the subsequent
eradication of the disease in the 1970s
The
Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition, in addition
to stopping the pandemic that was killing thousands of lives and
protecting hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of those territories,
laid the foundations for the eradication of smallpox, which finally took
place in the 1970s.
But in addition to Balmis and the Catalan surgeon Josep Salvany, one of the key figures in the success of the mission was
Isabel Zendal, who was in charge of caring for and
accompanying the children who served as carriers of the vaccine from
Spain to America and the Philippines.
She was born in 1773 in a Galician village and came from a poor family. Zendal soon moved to La Coruña, where she started to work in 1800 at the
Casa de los Expósitos at the Charity Hospital. Her role there was to take care of the orphans between seven and fourteen years old
in exchange for a very small wage. One of the reasons she did not
hesitate to accept Balmis's offer which was much better paid and embark
on the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition in 1803.
Her role would be to care for the 22 orphaned children
between the ages of three and nine who had been inoculated with the
smallpox vaccine and who would serve as carriers during the
journey from Spain to Latin America and the Philippines aboard the
corvette Maria Pita. Children who, because of their condition, no one
wanted; except Isabel, who brought along her own son Benito, ten years
old, whom she raised as a single mother.
Zendal spent nine years sailing and travelling to immunise hundreds of thousands of people
in the first major universal vaccination campaign in human history. She
was instrumental in the expedition and she risked her own health to
care for the children night and day. From La Coruña, she left for Santa
Cruz de Tenerife, where she spent a month vaccinating. In January 1804
they left the Canary Islands and arrived in Puerto Rico on 9 February.
Just one year later the expedition left for the Philippines, with a
group of 26 children - among them Isabel's own son - where they arrived
in April 1805. Four years later, they returned to Acapulco, Mexico.
Isabel and her son Benito settled in that country, in the city of
Puebla, and
never returned to Spain.
Most of the orphans were also adopted in Mexico, where their
future was better than what they would have had in Spain - one of them
even became a lawyer and law professor.
International recognition
Despite her extraordinary role in the expedition, it was
decades before Isabel Zendal received the recognition she deserved.
History records did not give her the credit she deserved as up until
recent times
35 different versions of her name were recorded incorrectly, with variations such as Zendalla, Cendales, Gandalla and Sendales.
We had to wait until 1950, when
Isabel Zendal was considered by the World Health
Organization (WHO) as the first nurse in history to be sent on an
international public health mission. On top of this
international recognition the National Nursing Prize awarded by the
Mexican Government has been awarding this prize in her honour since
1975. Zendal also has a monument and a street in La Coruña: a film
about her,
22 Angels, directed by Miguel Bardem; she appears in novels such as
A flor de piel (Javier Moro),
Ángeles custodios (Almudena de Arteaga) and
Los niños de la viruela (María Solar); a comic book, and she even has her own club.
However, both the feats of the Philanthropic Expedition -
they vaccinated more than 250,000 people and established
vaccination boards and preventive medicine in territories around the
world - and Zendal's role remain unknown to a large part of the
population. A crisis like the one caused by coronavirus allows us to
reflect on the past and recognise that it was also ingenuity, dedication
and effort that allowed them to overcome complex situations.
https://www.thisistherealspain.com/en/latest-news/isabel-zendal-the-first-nurse-in-history-to-be-sent-on-an-international-mission/
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