We know little about this admirable woman, the first nurse on an international mission; even her name seems to be camouflaged in different variants and to slip away from a history in which she was always at the service of others.
We know that she was born into a poor family in Órdenes, A Coruña, in 1773. That her mother died of smallpox; she was not even thirteen years old when she began to work, and entered as an assistant in the Hospital de la Caridad de La Coruña, where she was promoted to Rector of Foundlings. We know that when she was twenty years old she had her son Benito, when she was unmarried.
Perhaps this past led her to accompany the children selected for the Royal Vaccine Expedition, promoted by the physician Francisco Balmis with the support of Charles IV. The expedition would last from 1803 to 1806 and would travel throughout the Spanish Empire. The same smallpox that had killed Isabella's mother was wreaking havoc throughout the world, and although Jenner's vaccine already existed, it was impossible to preserve it, except in the human body. For that they needed the foundlings, the most vulnerable among the poor, 22 little children between 3 and 9 years old. Some were not orphans, but their parents had given them there to survive the misery.
Isabel embarked with them and her own son on November 30, 1803, on a corvette; they carried with them a pair of shoes, a change of clothes and the vaccine virus that was carefully passed from one to another every ten days. From the Canary Islands to Puerto Rico, and from there to Acapulco, then Manila, to return to Mexico, from where Isabel never returned. Neither she, nor her son, nor any of the children, even though the rules clearly indicated that they should be educated and returned to their villages. We do not know when she died, but it must have been soon, because in 1806 Balmis indicates that Isabel devoted herself to the children like a mother, that she cared for them and pampered them night and day until she ruined her own health. Two dozen creatures who were sick in turn, who needed not only attention but a little affection.
The expedition directly vaccinated some 250,000 people. It would not have been possible without Isabel Zendal. We do know that.
Espido Freire
