The bubonic epidemic reached Ecuador in 1908

By Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel*

The bubonic or black plague it was known in Europe in the fourteenth century and was brought from China by merchant ships that watered it to Constantinople, Genoa, Venice and Sicily. The mortality was so bloody that there were cities in which it killed fifty percent of the population; and it did not disappear completely, since it continued in an endemic form during the following three hundred years. It is believed that a third of the European population died from this plague, whose very remote origin has been located on the banks of the Ganges River, in India, where the first pandemic occurred in the fourth century before the common era.

Bubonic plague appears where the population accumulation and lack of hygiene allow rapid expansion. The contagion takes place between two and six days after the person has been bitten by an infected flea. At the same time, fleas are spread by biting rats, although squirrels and other rodents can also carry the disease. Sometimes the contagion occurs by air or through infected water droplets.

The illness produces in the sick subject high fever, chills, general weakness and purple, swollen and painful lymph nodes, called bubones, which can be external and internal. The first come out in the armpits and crotches; the second, in the throat or inside the liver or the lungs, and then it is the very serious pneumonic plague, almost impossible to cure. The disease tends to spread to other areas of the body if it is not treated in time. Bubonic is currently treated with antibiotics, but it has to be right away, because if the disease progresses it becomes fatal.

When did you arrive in Ecuador?

The last global pandemic originated in China around 1855 and spread slowly. In 1897 it appeared for the first time in America. From Paraguay it spread to neighboring states. From Chile, the contagion passed by ship to Callao in 1903. In Lima, a leprosy was opened for men and women, while the health authorities of Guayaquil did not even notice.

In 1908, the Dr. Ramón Flores Ontaneda I was preparing a trip to Germany, when the epidemic broke out in our city. First it was a large number of dead rats in the streets, then the first human cases began. Only then did the Municipality organize a technical body in charge of directing the anti-plague fight and called on him to direct it. For this reason, Flores Ontaneda postponed the trip and put into practice his scientific knowledge about the plague, acquired during his years of learning in Paris, so that he was the first doctor to isolate the plague in our city.the bacterium called Yersinia pestis, better known among the population as the “Yersin at cocobacilo”, causing the epidemic.

Immediately he began to manufacture Danis serum for rats, as was already practiced in laboratories in the United States and the Old World, so that the rats, when hatched, would bite each other, exterminating each other. Sick humans were injected with the Yersin serum to achieve their improvement, and if they were healthy, he vaccinated them with the Hafkins Lymph after fortifying them with the serum.

Dedicated to these tasks in the laboratory of the Vicente Rocafuerte school, “I had no rest.” In the mornings he went to the lazaretto in the savannah, to extract the liquid from the bubonics, some of whom died while the extraction was being carried out, due to how serious they were. Many times and for fear that this valuable man would catch the plague, they gave him doses of the Yersin serum to apply, but he gave it to someone seriously ill, since he believed he was immunized by being in direct contact with bubonics.

That mistake was fatal to him and took him to the grave, because when he preferred to be vaccinated without taking the precaution of strengthening his organism with a previous application of the Lymph, as he had been infected without knowing it, the disease developed uncontrollably and in the worst of forms, pneumonia, with buboes or tumors. interiors.

His strong body disintegrated in just two days and all this despite the struggle displayed by his colleagues and medical collaborators. He died on April 21, 1908 at dawn, smiling and in full use of his mental faculties, to the point that the night before he had diagnosed how and when the final attack would occur. He was only fifty-four years old. “The news soon spread in the city and the population became even more alarmed than it already was.”

As a sanitary measure, the Municipality ordered the destruction by fire of the old town hall where the Act of Independence had been signed in 1820, because on the ground floor there were numerous barracks and grocery stores that were nests for rats. Many families were afraid to take their patients to the lazaretto, since the mortality rate was very high in said nursing home, and they preferred to hide them in isolated places. Eduardo Game lent a cane shack to a compadre in Durán, where he took his little daughter Esther, sick, only eight years old, who was diligently cared for by Dr. Herman Parker, but died anyway.

Complying with strict sanitary measures, Parker sprayed the corpse with an antiseptic liquid, in case there could be an infected flea; and when Game found out—who was in a room next door—he threw himself at Parker, who had to run away. After Game apologized for the case, he had acted in the midst of pain for the death of his conceited.

And since there are always those who are reluctant to be vaccinated, I copy a verse from Juan Eusebio Molestina Matheus appeared in the Notice Journal in 1908.

thinking of the grim reaper

I touched my forehead

Chibolo size

Definitely a bubo

And I feel that fear

boggled my mind

And I feel between thorns

my good heart

II

If I call a doctor

I sure have

That to the great Lazaretto

send me to die

And like it or not

would have to go

III

That’s why I don’t want doctors

I don’t want instruments

that me with lemons

I cured the bubo.

* Eugenio Espejo National Prize for Culture 2005, literature category.