{
  "id": "hospital-de-san-lazaro-de-mexico",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Hospital de San Lázaro de México: three centuries of leprosy care, twice destroyed by the authorities that ran it",
  "summary": "A leprosarium founded at Mexico City in the first years after the conquest, pulled down within a decade by the president of the audiencia who wanted the site, refounded by a physician in 1572, made family property by his will, handed to the Order of San Juan de Dios in 1721, rebuilt at fourteen times the sum promised, secularised in 1787 and finally emptied in 1862 to save the city money. Its endowed capacity was 44 beds; a printed return of 1774 records 113 patients in five years.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "medicine",
    "hospitals",
    "leprosy",
    "welfare",
    "new-spain",
    "mexico",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "americas",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "eighteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "pedro-lopez-hospital-de-la-epifania-1582"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "orden-hospitalaria-de-san-juan-de-dios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospital-de-jesus-nazareno"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hernan-cortes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "epidemic-records-of-spanish-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "orden-de-la-caridad-de-san-hipolito"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Where were people with leprosy cared for in colonial Mexico?",
    "Who founded the Hospital de San Lázaro of Mexico City?",
    "What did the royal cédula of 1530 about San Lázaro order?",
    "How many beds did a colonial Mexican leprosarium have?",
    "Why did the Order of San Juan de Dios lose the hospital of San Lázaro in 1787?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The first house was Cortés's and was built to separate as well as to treat. The 1854 article says the hospital \"es uno de los mas antiguos, si no en cuanto á su actual fábrica material, á lo menos en cuanto á su establecimiento, que data nada menos que de los primeros años de la conquista\", that all historians of the period say so \"aun los menos parciales á D. Fernando Cortes\", and that he founded it \"destinándolo á la curacion y separacion de los leprosos, en la Ribera de San Cosme, en el sitio que por mucho tiempo se llamó 'el Marques,' y en el idioma mexicano 'Tlachpana'\". Its authority for the conquistador's concern with hospitals is Bernal Díaz, cited as Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva-España, cap. 170.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "It was destroyed within ten years by the head of the colonial government, for his own convenience. \"Aun no habia pasado una decena de años, cuando aquel hospital fué echado por tierra por Nuño de Guzman, quien tomándose el terreno que debia ser muy amplio, por sí y ante sí se edificó una casa y huerta para su recreo.\" The president of the first audiencia took the leprosarium's ground for a country house.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The crown's answer survives as a quoted royal cédula, and it is worth reading for its reasoning as much as for its order. Madrid, 12 July 1530, signed \"La Reyna\", \"Por mandado de S. M. Juan de Sámano\": the queen has been told that where a house of San Lázaro had been made, \"en que se recogiessen los pobres, el Presidente Nuño de Guzman la deshizo, y tomó para sí, en que ha edificado una casa, y huerta\"; the reason he wrote back was \"porque por la dicha casa pasaba el Agua de Chapultepec, que viene para sustentamiento de la ciudad de México, y que estando allí los pobres de San Lázaro, que de fuerza se avian de servir primero de la dicha agua, de labar sus ropas, y otros servicios, y podia traer inconveniente para los moradores de la dicha ciudad\". The order is to investigate and, if the site was genuinely unsuitable, to approve the replacement; and if none had been built, \"hagais que á costa de las personas, que de justicia la deben pagar, se edifique en el lugar que os pareciere, tal, y tan buena, como la que deshizo\". The cédula is quoted at second hand from a nineteenth-century encyclopaedia; the original was not opened.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The replacement was never built. \"No hay vestigio ninguno en la historia de ese hospital, que segun se espresa la cédula, habia mandado fabricar el mencionado presidente, ni tampoco de que por su defecto se volviese á erigir otro en lugar menos molesto y perjudicial á la poblacion.\" An order from the crown, with a cost clause attached, produced nothing on the ground for four decades - which is the measure of what a cédula was worth against a president in possession.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "A working physician refounded it out of his own pocket. The article records that Dr Pedro López, founder of the hospital of Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, \"por el año de 1572, es decir, mas de 40 despues de la antedicha cédula, obtenida licencia, como para fundacion nueva, del Illmo. Sr. arzobispo D. Pedro Moya de Contreras, edificó y fundó el hospital de S. Lázaro para los leprosos, parte de sus propios bienes, y parte tambien de las limosnas que recabó á este fin\". Two dates in that sentence sit awkwardly: Moya de Contreras is styled archbishop in a year before he held the see, and this corpus's entry on the same physician's other foundation dates it from a municipal donation of 1582. The refoundation is carried here as López's and as of the early 1570s, with the discrepancy named rather than smoothed.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.6
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "He kept it going himself and then turned it into family property. He maintained it \"por sí ... y á esmeros de su caridad y diligencia hasta el de 1596, en que por su última disposicion y testamento que otorgó en 13 de febrero de este año, por ante Rodrigo de Leon, escribano público de esta ciudad, instituyó herederos y patronos de este hospital seis hijos que dejó\" - Dr José López, cura del Sagrario, Dr Agustín, presbyter, Nicolás, Catarina, María and Juana López. The patronage then descended in the male line and, when that line failed, passed by viceregal appointment in 1656 to a great-grandson through the eldest daughter, and was afterwards litigated between cousins until it settled on Br Diego de Anguiano y Picazo, who held it to 1721. A charity endowed as an inheritance is a charity whose governance follows a family's fortunes.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "By the early eighteenth century the wards were near collapse and the crown's judge forced the issue. \"Por este tiempo, tanto por los muchos años que llevaba de fabricado el hospital, como por la suma escasez de limosnas con que principalmente subsistia, casi llegaron á arruinarse las enfermerías\"; the juez de hospitales y colegios, the oidor Juan de Olivan Rebolledo, summoned the founder's descendants to repair it \"pena de perder el patronato y administracion\". Br Ventura de Medina was agreed as patron on condition that the patronage be ceded by perpetual renunciation to the Order of San Juan de Dios, which would take the whole administration and maintain the house from the funds named in the deed and from alms it could solicit, \"sin obligacion ninguna de dar cuentas\" - with no obligation to render accounts at all.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The order took possession on 20 May 1721, with the approval of the viceroy marqués de Valero, and only \"con la calidad de tal y no como convento de la órden\" - as a hospital and not as a house of religion. There had been prior opposition from the curas of Santa Catarina Mártir over parish rights, which the article says it cannot follow to its end.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The rebuilding accounts are the hardest number in the whole account, and they show the promise and the outlay diverging by a factor of fourteen. By deed of 13 May 1733 between Ventura de Medina and the commissary Fray Francisco Barradas, before the escribano real José de Anaya Bonillo, Medina bound himself to 8,000 pesos only - 1,000 to endow the lamp and 7,000 for the rebuilding at the commissary's discretion. The religious spent 15,300 on the infirmaries and lower convent; 65,175 on the church fabric, the camarín of Nuestra Señora de la Bala, the upper convent, clean-water piping and repairs; 7,867 on the church's adornment, paintings, organ, ornaments and sacred vessels; and 21,902 on the costs of dedication and on capitales fincados for bread and meat for the sick and some feasts - \"de manera, que habiéndose solo ofrecido 8.000 pesos, se gastaron 110.244\". At the handover there were six patients in the house.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "In the great epidemic of the late 1730s the leprosarium opened its doors to the general sick while keeping its own patients apart. Fr José Peláez, who had served for his skill in surgery in the armada de Barlovento, \"se hizo ademas muy célebre cuando la epidemia del Matlazahuatl, en la que abrió el hospital, dejando una separacion para los lazarinos, á los muchos apestados de ella, especialmente de los suburbios del Cármen, de la Soledad de Santa Cruz y de la Candelaria\"; soliciting alms from private persons and helped above all by the congregación de la Purísima at the Jesuit Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo, whose prefect was P. Nicolás de Segura, he \"recibió mas de 600 enfermos, los que fueron asistidos sin perdonar gastos, y con tal felicidad, que apenas llegaron á una quinta parte los muertos\". The mortality figure is the writer's, offered without a register behind it, and is reported here as a claim of the source.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.6
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The one printed return the article quotes gives both the size of the house and the shape of the disease. Under the juaninos it came to have good dwellings, offices and a well-cultivated garden, for which the Spanish government granted 250 varas square of the neighbouring ejido; and \"el número de las camas para enfermos de ambos sexos, que tenian dotacion, era el de 44, segun consta de un estado de los hospitales de San Juan de Dios, de la provincia de Nueva España, publicada en 1774 que tenemos á la vista\". The same return records that over five years \"ciento trece enfermos\" were assisted. The article reads the low turnover as evidence that the real number exceeded the endowed one, since patients of this class \"durando comunmente ... muchos años\"; the plainer reading is that a forty-four-bed leprosarium admitted about twenty-three people a year because those admitted stayed for life.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c12",
      "text": "In 1787 the hospitallers lost the house to a procedural argument. The article reports, from manuscripts \"de cuya entera autenticidad no respondemos\", that after the Antonine religious were secularised on the pretext that the disease they treated no longer existed, the ordinary visited San Lázaro on the ground that it lacked the number of religious the constitutions of San Juan de Dios required for exemption; that it was alleged the hospital had not been founded with express royal approval but only by \"una cédula antiquísima de 27 de marzo de 1606, en que se hablaba en general de la facultad de erigir hospitales 'en cualquier lugar de Nueva España'\"; that the curas of Santa Catarina renewed their old opposition; and that the juaninos gave the house up despite more than a century of possession and the formal clause that it was not a convent. It notes a coincidence: the prior of the day was called Fr Pedro López, the founder's name.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.65
    },
    {
      "id": "c13",
      "text": "The article is a defence brief and says so, which is why its chronology is more useful than its verdicts. It sets out to refute \"escritores modernos\" who write \"que el descuido y el egoismo fueron la sola herencia que legaron en su destruccion los hospitalarios en México\", and its own argument is a dating one: when the orders were suppressed in 1821 by what it calls \"el impío decreto de las córtes españolas\", the juaninos had already handed San Lázaro over more than thirty years earlier, so the ruin that followed belongs to the secular administration. The ruin itself it does not dispute - \"en su fábrica material no quedó ni señal de las oficinas, ni vestigio de la huerta\".",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c14",
      "text": "The republic kept it alive at a measured cost and then closed it to save money. By the ayuntamiento's own memoria of 1851 the beds maintained from public funds numbered fifty, \"de personas de ambos sexos, de diversas edades y de distinta clasificacion en las enfermedades de la piel de que adolecen\", and their subsistence and treatment cost \"poco mas ó menos un año con otro la cantidad de doce mil pesos\", a figure that includes the expenses of worship in the church. Eleven years later Orozco y Berra records the end: on 12 August 1862 \"fueron traidos de San Lázaro y aposentados en las desiertas celdas, los lazarinos de ambos sexos\" of the municipal hospital installed in a former Augustinian college, \"aquella reunion se habia hecho necesaria para minorar los gastos del municipio\", and two wards were built for them early in 1864.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro",
        "orozco-y-berra-memoria-plano-mexico-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c15",
      "text": "The evidence base is two Mexican compilations of 1854 and 1867 and nothing else. Neither cites at the point of use; the 1854 article is signed \"J. M. D.\" and argues a case; the 1867 memoir was written by Manuel Orozco y Berra, who is also named among the Mexican editors of the encyclopaedia, so the two are not fully independent witnesses. The cédula of 1530, the will of 1596, the deed of 1733, the printed return of 1774 and the municipal memoria of 1851 are all read through these quotations; none of those documents was opened here. No patient register, no admission criterion and no account of how people with leprosy were brought to the house survives in what was read.",
      "sources": [
        "diccionario-universal-mexico-1854-tomo-iv-lazaro",
        "orozco-y-berra-memoria-plano-mexico-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Leprosy care in Spanish America is close to absent from English writing, and where San Lázaro of Mexico appears it is a line in a list of foundations. This entry gives the institution its three hundred and forty years and its numbers: a royal cédula of 12 July 1530 quoted at length, in which the crown's own explanation for the destruction of the first house is that the Chapultepec water passed it and the poor of San Lázaro washed in it first; the order that a replacement be built \"á costa de las personas, que de justicia la deben pagar\", and the article's flat record that no such replacement was ever traced; a refoundation paid for out of a physician's own goods and then willed to his six children as heritable patronage; a cession to the Order of San Juan de Dios in 1721 explicitly \"sin obligacion ninguna de dar cuentas\"; a rebuilding in which 8,000 pesos were promised and 110,244 spent; an endowed capacity of 44 beds against 113 patients in five years, from a printed return of 1774; a secularisation in 1787 argued on a defect in the founding licence; and a closure in 1862 whose stated motive was to reduce municipal expenditure. It also names what its single main source is doing - defending the hospitaller orders against nineteenth-century critics - so that its chronology can be used without adopting its verdicts.",
  "confidence": 0.7,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-13",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hospital-de-san-lazaro-de-mexico",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Hospital de San Lázaro de México: three centuries of leprosy care, twice destroyed by the authorities that ran it",
    "description": "A leprosarium founded at Mexico City in the first years after the conquest, pulled down within a decade by the president of the audiencia who wanted the site, refounded by a physician in 1572, made family property by his will, handed to the Order of San Juan de Dios in 1721, rebuilt at fourteen times the sum promised, secularised in 1787 and finally emptied in 1862 to save the city money. Its endowed capacity was 44 beds; a printed return of 1774 records 113 patients in five years.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hospital-de-san-lazaro-de-mexico",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-13",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Memoria para el plano de la ciudad de México, formada de órden del Ministerio de Fomento - the sections BIBLIOTECA DE CATEDRAL, HOSPITAL DE JESUS NAZARENO and HOSPITAL MUNICIPAL",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=UX-K43hmxUQC&pg=PA194"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "The article LAZARO (Hospital de san) in the Diccionario universal de historia y de geografía, tomo IV, H - LYT",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=LcBa9gWcXpoC&pg=PA671"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Hospital de San Lázaro de México: three centuries of leprosy care, twice destroyed by the authorities that ran it"
  }
}