| Summary: | This article examines the multiple actors and varied strategies that contributed to turn smallpox vaccination into a central – albeit inconsistent – practice in Mexico City between 1803, when the Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition began, and 1872, when the Superior Board of Health took over the coordination and administration of the vaccine in Mexico City. Thus, one of its central arguments is that, although smallpox vaccination lacked of a solid and uniform legal and institutional framework, that preventive practice was prompted by numerous actors and institutions that resorted to a wide array of strategies in an attempt to contain the propagation of that disease, and that they were carried out before the consolidation of the nation-state and the affirmation of the positivist paradigm that was to characterize public health interventions during the last third of the nineteenth century.
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