{ "id": "bando-de-curacion-de-heridos-1777", "type": "entity", "name": "The bando of 1777: treat the wounded first, tell the judge afterwards", "summary": "Surgeons in New Spain would not treat a wounded person until a magistrate authorised it, and people bled to death waiting. In May 1777 the viceroy ordered every surgeon in the kingdom to treat first, at any hour, and to notify a royal judge afterwards within eight hours at the latest, on a rising scale of fines, exile and presidio. The order had to be repeated in 1793 and renewed again in 1794, and the gazette that reprinted it said why: some practitioners still would not go out at night.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "medicine", "colonial-law", "new-spain", "mexico", "public-health", "colonial-institutions", "spanish-empire", "eighteenth-century", "law", "americas" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "hospital-returns-in-print-1787-1794" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "lopez-de-hinojosos-suma-de-cirugia-1578" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospital-real-de-san-jose-de-los-naturales" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias" } ], "questions": [ "Was there a legal duty to treat the wounded in colonial Spanish America?", "What was the bando of 14 May 1777 in New Spain?", "Why did surgeons refuse to treat wounded people before a judge ordered it?", "Did emergency-care obligations exist before modern medical law?", "Was the rule obeyed in eighteenth-century Mexico?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The problem was put to the viceroy by the city. In a consultation of 17 February the town council of Mexico City reported that in so numerous a population the quarrels and brawls were frequent, and that many people came out of them wounded, and that this harm needed a prompt remedy of first intention, such as stopping the bleeding.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The obstacle was a professional custom with a legal cause. Surgeons observed the practice of not treating patients until an order of the magistrate had come first, a requirement that urgency often did not allow to be complied with promptly. The council's text states the consequence without softening it: with the delay it was not only that wounds became incurable, but that on many occasions death was accelerated, death that would have been avoided had the case been attended in time.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The motive was mixed and the document says so itself, which is why it can be quoted rather than guessed at. The delay was also held to offend the public interest in punishing crime, because when such fights happened in hidden places or at irregular hours the wounded man died and the discovery of the culprit became very difficult. The reform was argued for the patient and for the prosecution at the same time.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The forensic objection was answered rather than dismissed. The record of the wound could still be secured, the argument ran, if the surgeon were obliged to give notice at once, or at the first convenient hour, to the royal judge who could hear the cause, so that his declaration on the nature of the wound could be taken and the notary put it on record. In this way, the text concludes, neither would crimes stay hidden nor would the health of the sick man be risked.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The precedent was metropolitan and recent. The council cited a bando of the Real Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte of Madrid, of 1 August of the previous year, requiring surgeons in Spain to treat any person wounded by a violent hand or by accident before reporting to the magistrate, wherever they were called, giving notice to the royal judge afterwards without losing time, under penalty of twenty ducados for the first offence, forty ducados and four years of exile for the second, and sixty-six ducados and six years of presidio for the third.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The viceroy adopted it for the whole kingdom. After the crown attorney's view and the opinion of the assessor general of the viceroyalty, and by decree of 19 April, Antonio Maria Bucareli y Ursua qualified the council's proposal as just and proper to humanity, and ordered that all surgeons of the capital and of the other cities, villas, places and towns of the kingdom attend promptly, and without any need for a prior order or mandate of a judge, to treat anyone wounded by a violent hand or by chance, whenever they were called, at whatever hour and in whatever circumstances.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The obligation carried a clock and a price. Once the first treatment was concluded the surgeon was to notify one of the royal judges immediately, or within the precise term of eight hours if the time of the event made that inconvenient, under penalty of twenty-five pesos the first time he failed either to treat or to give notice within the term, fifty pesos and two years of exile twenty leagues from his place of residence for the second, and one hundred pesos and four years of presidio for the third. The bando was dated in Mexico on 14 May 1777, ordered published in the capital and the other places of the kingdom through the customary cordillera, with copies to the Real Sala del Crimen.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "A second printed witness has the same rule ten years earlier than the gazette. Belena's 1787 compilation of the standing orders of the Audiencia of New Spain carries it as numbered abstract CXLVIII, in wording that matches the gazette's text almost to the letter in its operative part, the eight-hour term and the whole penalty ladder of twenty-five, fifty with two years of exile at twenty leagues, and one hundred with four years of presidio.", "sources": [ "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The two printings disagree about the date and the disagreement is left standing here rather than resolved. The margin of the 1787 compilation heads the abstract as a bando of 24 May 1719. The gazette prints the full text dated 14 May 1777 and signed by Bucareli, who governed New Spain from 1771 to 1779, and whose text argues from a town council consultation of that February and from a Madrid bando of the previous year. The internal evidence favours 1777 and suggests the earlier date is a slip in the compilation's margin, but no third witness was consulted and the possibility of an earlier order of the same tenor is not excluded.", "sources": [ "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos", "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.6 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "Compliance was poor and the state's own gazette printed the proof. The order had to be repeated by the Conde de Revilla Gigedo in an order of 26 May 1793 addressed to the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato and the judges of the capital, because some professors of medicine and surgeons of the capital had excused themselves from going out, even when called by the judges, to treat and attend the sick and wounded in the course of the night, offering trivial reasons to excuse a notable and harmful failure in the discharge of their obligation.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The 1793 repetition widened the duty beyond surgeons. The viceroy directed that physicians, surgeons, apothecaries and midwives be made to understand that they must attend immediately when called by the interested parties and by the judges, in whatever cases and accidents might arise, as much for the prompt relief of the patients as for the right administration of justice, and that at the least justified complaint of contravention he would take a serious measure against whoever failed to observe it.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "It still did not hold. The 1794 text states that failures were still being experienced which immediately worked to the injury of the public, and that the viceroy had therefore resolved to renew everything previously ordered, to be observed and executed without excuse or pretext under the penalties of 1777 for the surgeons and the warning of 1793 for physicians, surgeons and midwives, and to be published again by bando so that ignorance could not be pleaded. It appeared in the gazette as the second of three bandos published by the viceroy's order on the tenth, twenty-third and twenty-fifth of that month.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "A narrower duty of the same kind was already old in the capital. The same 1787 compilation carries an order agreed on 10 January 1726 requiring the physician and surgeons of the court prison to attend its infirmary every day as their obligation required, with the gaoler bound to report whether they complied or not so that the corresponding measure could be taken. The duty to attend, and the mechanism of making somebody else report on compliance, are both older than 1777.", "sources": [ "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Ask where the legal duty to treat an emergency patient comes from and the answer arrives as twentieth-century statute and case law. This is a viceregal bando of 1777 that states the duty in almost the modern form, aimed at the exact obstacle that produced it, and it is quoted here from two printings that were opened page by page: the annual volume of the Gazetas de Mexico for 1794, which reprints the whole text with its 1793 and 1794 renewals, and the 1787 compilation of the Audiencia's standing orders, which abstracts the same rule word for word and dates it, in its margin, to a year that cannot be right. Both the reform and its failure are on the record in the government's own paper: the eight-hour notice, the ladder of twenty-five, fifty and a hundred pesos, the openly mixed motive of saving the patient and catching the culprit, and the three separate occasions on which the crown had to order it again because physicians would not leave the house at night.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/bando-de-curacion-de-heridos-1777", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/bando-de-curacion-de-heridos-1777.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The bando of 1777: treat the wounded first, tell the judge afterwards", "description": "Surgeons in New Spain would not treat a wounded person until a magistrate authorised it, and people bled to death waiting. In May 1777 the viceroy ordered every surgeon in the kingdom to treat first, at any hour, and to notify a royal judge afterwards within eight hours at the latest, on a rising scale of fines, exile and presidio. The order had to be repeated in 1793 and renewed again in 1794, and the gazette that reprinted it said why: some practitioners still would not go out at night.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/bando-de-curacion-de-heridos-1777", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-12", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Recopilación sumaria de los autos acordados de la Real Audiencia de esta Nueva España, que desde el año de 1677 hasta el de 1786 han podido recogerse", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=MzFAAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA2-PP1" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Gazetas de México, compendio de noticias de Nueva España, del año de 1794 — Tomo Sexto", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=csyuPK3XA3UC&pg=PP5" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The bando of 1777: treat the wounded first, tell the judge afterwards" } }