{ "id": "hospital-returns-in-print-1787-1794", "type": "entity", "name": "Hospitals that printed their own numbers: New Spain and Cadiz, 1787-1794", "summary": "Every January the gazette of Mexico City printed how many patients each hospital had taken in the year before, how many had left, how many had died and how many were still in bed, and once worked out the death rate itself. The returns cover a general hospital in the capital, the naval port hospital at Veracruz, the poorhouse, and a hospital in Cadiz. They record a good deal the government would have had no reason to advertise, including where the money for an Indian hospital came from.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "medicine", "hospitals", "public-health", "new-spain", "mexico", "spain", "colonial-institutions", "statistics", "eighteenth-century", "americas" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "bando-de-curacion-de-heridos-1777" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-hospicio-de-pobres-de-mexico" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hospital-real-de-san-jose-de-los-naturales" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "epidemic-records-of-spanish-america" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "antivenereal-trials-san-andres-1790" } ], "questions": [ "Did colonial hospitals publish statistics?", "What was the death rate in an eighteenth-century Mexican hospital?", "How many patients did the Hospital General de San Andres treat in 1793?", "How was the Hospital General de Naturales in Mexico City paid for?", "Where can eighteenth-century Spanish hospital returns be read?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The capital's general hospital published a full year's account. For 1793 the Hospital General de San Andres in Mexico City reported 6658 admitted, 5820 discharged, 451 dead, 387 still in the house at the end of the year, and 144867 patient-days. The four outcome figures add exactly to the number admitted, and the patient-days work out at about twenty-two days of care for each person admitted.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The gazette did not leave the reader to do the division. It compared the year with 1792, finding 346 more admitted, 299 more discharged, 16 more dead and 31 more resident, and then stated the rate: the dead against the admitted came to a little more than six and a half per hundred. A colonial newspaper printing a hospital's own case-fatality rate, and its movement against the previous year, is the part of this that has no obvious counterpart in the English-language picture of the period.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The naval port reported on the same pattern. The Real Hospital de San Carlos at Veracruz stated that 107 patients were under treatment on 31 December 1792, that 3018 entered during the year, making 3125 in all, of whom 2885 left cured, 77 died, and 163 remained under treatment at the end of December 1793. Those figures also balance exactly, and the deaths come to about 2.5 per hundred admitted.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The poorhouse rendered the same kind of account. The Real Hospicio de Pobres of Mexico City reported 758 men and women present on 31 December 1792 and 659 entering during 1793, making 1417; 564 left during the year, 76 died, and 777 remained on 31 December 1793. Its infirmaries held or received 427 people in the year, of whom 295 left cured and 56 were still in bed at the year's end. Again the totals reconcile.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The practice was not confined to the Americas, and the same gazette carried the metropolitan version. From 1 January 1792 to the end of December 1793 the Hospital General de San Juan de Dios at Cadiz, the only one in that city, took in 4062 sick of the common sort and 147 from the poorhouse of the Santa Caridad, of whom 518 and 34 respectively died, leaving 118 in beds. The deaths there run at about one in eight of those admitted, against one in fifteen at San Andres, and neither return offers any explanation of the difference.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The Cadiz return also counted what it gave away. It stated that its totals did not include the soldiers and poor of both sexes who were treated daily at the gate, at any hour and without taking a bed, to whom the religious surgeons of the house administered medicines and dressings, reckoned at 53 a day, nor those hurt on ships or at public works, nor the wounded, who were received like any other sick person at whatever hour they reached its doors.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The cost of that charity is printed in the same paragraph as the charity. The Cadiz house recorded that in those two years seven Protestants had been catechised into the Catholic religion inside the hospital, five of them English and two Danish. Free treatment at the door and conversion of the patient are stated by the institution itself as two aspects of the same work.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "What these numbers are must be stated with them. They are returns furnished by the institutions and printed in a compendium of news of New Spain published with licence and privilege and dedicated to the serving viceroy, the Conde de Revilla Gigedo; the same volume prints commodity prices at Havana which the viceroy ordered inserted for the benefit of merchants and farmers. Nothing in the pages claims an outside audit of the hospital figures, and none is asserted here.", "sources": [ "gazetas-de-mexico-1794-tomo-sexto" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "Seven years earlier the same habit of publishing institutional numbers appears in a law book. Belena's 1787 compilation describes the Hospital General de Naturales of Mexico City as a royal foundation almost as old as the occupation of America, with a pharmacy, eight wards of considerable capacity and a separate one for rabies, five chaplains, two physicians, two surgeons and several assistants and nurses, and states that its daily sick did not commonly fall below 220 and often passed 300.", "sources": [ "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The same paragraph prints where the money came from, and it is the least comfortable figure in this object. The hospital's income ran to about 40000 pesos a year, of which 1400 came as alms from the royal treasury, while its principal funds were some 23000 pesos produced by the half-real that every Indian tributary of the kingdom paid, and the lease of the playhouse, last farmed at 8225 pesos a year against under 5000 in earlier years. The hospital for Indians was paid for chiefly by a levy on Indians.", "sources": [ "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The same description records the teaching attached to it: a chair of practical anatomy in the hospital, set up in imitation of those of Cadiz and Barcelona, from which the compiler says a great public benefit resulted. The requirement had teeth elsewhere in the same volume, which orders that candidates for examination in surgery produce a certificate of four complete courses in that chair, and forbids the royal medical tribunal to examine anyone without it.", "sources": [ "belena-recopilacion-sumaria-1787-autos" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The compiler disclosed his own interest on the page. The description notes that the hospital is governed by ordinances of 8 August 1770 approved by royal decree of 27 October 1776, and that a minister of the Audiencia serves as its protecting judge, which at the time of printing was the author of the book himself. The reader is told, in the text, that the man describing the institution was one of its officers.", "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": "The usual answer to what colonial hospitals achieved is an anecdote or a founding date. These are the institutions' own annual returns, read off the printed page: 6658 admitted and 451 dead at San Andres in 1793 with 144867 patient-days and a case-fatality rate the gazette computed itself, 3125 through the naval hospital at Veracruz with 77 dead, 1417 through the poorhouse with 76 dead, 4209 through the one hospital of Cadiz with 552 dead over two years, every set of figures internally reconciling. Because the method here is accumulation and not selection, the same pages supply what a favourable account would omit: the Cadiz house counting its seven converted Protestants beside the 53 people a day it treated free at the gate, and a compilation of 1787 stating that the royal hospital for Indians in Mexico City drew some 23000 of its 40000 pesos from a half-real levied on every Indian tributary in the kingdom, and 8225 more from the lease of the playhouse. The returns are unaudited and printed in a gazette dedicated to the viceroy, and that limit is a claim here rather than a footnote.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hospital-returns-in-print-1787-1794", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/hospital-returns-in-print-1787-1794.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Hospitals that printed their own numbers: New Spain and Cadiz, 1787-1794", "description": "Every January the gazette of Mexico City printed how many patients each hospital had taken in the year before, how many had left, how many had died and how many were still in bed, and once worked out the death rate itself. The returns cover a general hospital in the capital, the naval port hospital at Veracruz, the poorhouse, and a hospital in Cadiz. They record a good deal the government would have had no reason to advertise, including where the money for an Indian hospital came from.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/hospital-returns-in-print-1787-1794", "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": "Hospitals that printed their own numbers: New Spain and Cadiz, 1787-1794" } }