From the 1850s onwards, the Parisian Academy of Sciences awarded the Prix Bréant to incentivize all sorts of contributions in the fight against cholera. We use the Bréant archive in order to reappraise an old debate within the History of Spanish medicine regarding the merits of Jaume Ferrán’s anti-cholera vaccine. In 1884, Ferrán, a Catalan physician, claimed to have synthesized in his laboratory a vaccine. It was then widely used in the Valencia 1885 epidemic. A self-proclaimed symbol of progressivism, Ferrán sought national and international recognition in order to develop his treatment. But he was caught in several political controversies that still loom large on the interpretation of his findings. Although Ferrán started applying for the Bréant as early as 1885, it was not awarded a mention until 1907. Spanish historians have interpreted the delay as a sign of a nationalist bias on the part of the French jury. Drawing on the archival materials of Ferrán’s submissions, we suggest a different interpretation in terms of the quality of the data that Ferrán presented. Although the physicians in the jury were not yet familiar with statistical inference, they were already demanding clarity and order in the presentation of data on clinical experiments, a requirement which Ferrán clearly failed to carry out, as we shall see. The jury’s demand for data cleanliness illustrates how a new standard of clinical data management emerged in medicine at the turn of the 20th century.
