The hospital law of the Indies (Recopilación, libro I, título 4)

A 1541 order that hospitals be founded in every town of the Indies, Spanish and Indian alike, codified with twelve further laws into the título "De los Hospitales, y Cofradías". It fixes where a hospital may stand relative to the town, who audits it, which brotherhoods run it, and — in Peru — the head levy indigenous tributaries paid for their own hospitals. The law that governs that levy exists because the officials collecting it were taking it.