The Hospital de la Cuna at Santa Fe de México — a foundling house and why it was needed

Two printed witnesses, a century apart, record a cradle-hospital at Quiroga's Santa Fe outside Mexico City where exposed infants were baptised, given salaried wet-nurses, clothed and raised until they joined the town's work. The 1766 account also states plainly what it was built against: Indian children found drowned at dawn in the canals of Mexico, and mothers too destitute to feed them. The relief and the cause are set down here from the same pages.