Ongoing Projects
The 1804 introduction of the smallpox vaccine raised unprecedented questions in the Spanish Empire about patient rights and medical consent. By royal order, vaccination was voluntary—a problem for doctors in need of bodies to reproduce, test, and circulate the vaccine. My dissertation—Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840—considers how patients and doctors negotiated this question of consent and explains how and why voluntary vaccination developed in the nineteenth-century Spanish Atlantic World. In an age of revolution, ideas about vaccination became embedded in struggles over slavery, parental rights, individual freedoms, and colonial hierarchies. At times, medical consent was pronounced a natural right of fathers, a demonstration of scientific expertise, and/or an act of loyalty to the crown. I analyze the gendered and racialized assumptions that informed these visions of consent—and the ways women, children, and the enslaved challenged them. In doing so, I show how the idea of medical consent—and its promise of ethical care—worked to uphold rather than contest the structures of colonial power.
The 1804 introduction of the smallpox vaccine raised unprecedented questions in the Spanish Empire about patient rights and medical consent. By royal order, vaccination was voluntary—a problem for doctors in need of bodies to reproduce, test, and circulate the vaccine. My dissertation—Laboratories of Consent: Vaccine Science in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1779-1840—considers how patients and doctors negotiated this question of consent and explains how and why voluntary vaccination developed in the nineteenth-century Spanish Atlantic World. In an age of revolution, ideas about vaccination became embedded in struggles over slavery, parental rights, individual freedoms, and colonial hierarchies. At times, medical consent was pronounced a natural right of fathers, a demonstration of scientific expertise, and/or an act of loyalty to the crown. I analyze the gendered and racialized assumptions that informed these visions of consent—and the ways women, children, and the enslaved challenged them. In doing so, I show how the idea of medical consent—and its promise of ethical care—worked to uphold rather than contest the structures of colonial power.