​My current book project, Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine, is a history of vaccination and consent in the age of revolution. It follows the 1804 introduction of the smallpox vaccine into the Atlantic World and centers on the Spanish Empire, where according to royal orders, vaccination was voluntary and consent a natural right ceded to parents. Despite these protections, doctors came to rely on enslaved, Indigenous, and other dispossessed bodies to conserve and physically reproduce the vaccine across imperial lines. Analyzing this polemic and the politicization of preventative health, Atlantic Antidote traces the vaccine through the greater Caribbean to ask why Spanish authorities protected voluntary vaccination, what this choice meant for parents and patients, and what their stories can tell us about the value of consent in an era of both race and rights-making. 

I argue that consent, as it was envisioned and employed in vaccination policies, worked to uphold colonial structures of power under the auspices of individual freedom, demonstrating how immunization became embedded in struggles over the abolition of slavery, parental rights, and hierarchies challenged by the unrest of revolution. Archival materials reveal that recognition of rights was inconsistently determined by elite assumptions about reason and bodily difference. Racial and sexual politics informed decisions about which bodies were best suited to incubate and test the vaccine, whose knowledge was deemed a threat to public health, and ultimately, who should be recognized as a parent, capable of childrearing and competent enough to consent.​ By attending to these relations, the project underscores the centrality of reproductive politics to the creation and maintenance of the vaccine, and with it, the imperial designs of political leaders who hoped to wield it as a new power over life and death.