Comment on the article “With regard to the bicentennial of the independence of Colombia: Reading practices of Antonio Nariño and the development of a presumably effective vaccine against smallpox.

For the American colonies, smallpox implied a process that dramatically destabilized their sociodemographic dynamics, which explains why scientific development took place around the causative virus. Each book about smallpox in Nariño’s library was a tool in the fight against smallpox undertaken by the founding father. After reviewing the article “About the bicentennial of the independence of Colombia: The reading practices of Antonio Nariño and the development of a vaccine that is presumably effective against smallpox” (1), I set myself to study Antonio Nariño’s medical knowledge further. Through the approach to the works that Nariño used to educate himself on smallpox and the development of a biographical sketch of each of them, I analyzed the process of variolization in the Kingdom of Nueva Granada and the need to manufacture a vaccine locally.