Hospitals in New Spain
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Hospitals in New Spain
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In Mexican hospitals at the beginning of the colonial period, the idea of curing the soul took precedence over healing the actual body. Hospitals were not only meant to control the epidemic diseases triggered by the conquest, but they also served as valuable institutions to establish contact with indigenous peoples to spread Christianity. One of the most important hospitals was located on the hills southwest of Mexico City, called “Hospital de Santa Fe.” Friar Vasco de Quiroga combined religious, humanistic and economic ideas to create this “hospital-pueblo” or a small indigenous village with an infirmary located at the heart of the town in 1532, twenty years before the creation of the Uppsala map. Hospital-pueblos were created to house newly converted Christian natives. The Hospital de Santa Fe illustrated on the Uppsala map displays sick natives who are assembled on a plaza or court and additional buildings surrounding for the strange experiment in “conversion medicine.” Conversion medicine was an unusual way to fight the battle against illness in the New World, where demographic disaster and enforced and vast conversion to Christianity merged. The Hospital de Santa Fe consisted of a large square building surrounding a central courtyard. On one side of the court was an infirmary for the sick with infectious diseases and on the opposite side was a large room that housed the sick with common illnesses. In the center of the court, there was a chapel, with open sides so that the sick in both sections of the hospital could follow the Mass from their beds. Santa Fe operated with a staff comprised of indigenous nurses and caregivers. The staff members were responsible for caregiving jobs such as tending to patients and burying the dead. Hospital workers frequently walked through poor areas, collecting the homeless and dying, then moving them to the hospital so they could face death and eternity as Christians. Workers also studied catechism and participated in religious ceremonies. Hospital service was considered a basic foundation of good hands-on learning and an essential part of Christian indoctrination. Hospitals functioned as a way to control the epidemic diseases caused by the conquest, and they also served as valued organizations to form interaction with the natives to spread Christianity.
Bibliography: Lacas, M. M. "A Social Welfare Organizer in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Don Vasco De Quiroga, First Bishop of Michoacán." The Americas, 14, No. 01 (1957): 57-86. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Pardo-Tomás, José. "Hospitals in Mexico City in the 16th Century: Conversion Medicine and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge." In Connecting Worlds: Production and Circulation of Knowledge in the First Global Age. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Risse, Guenter B. Hospitals in Spanish America: Early Historical Perspectives. Conference: First Ibero-American Congress of the History of Medicine. San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1992. Cruz, Martín de la, Juan Badiano, and Emily W. Emmart Trueblood. The Badianus manuscript, Codex Barberini, Latin 241, Vatican Library; an Aztec herbal of 1552. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940.
The Badianus Manuscript