The Hipólitos: a hospitaller order founded in Mexico (1566) and destroyed by decree in 1821

In 1566 a layman of Mexico City opened a hospital outside the walls and then turned it over to the many demented people of the city who had nowhere to be cared for. The brotherhood that grew out of it took two papal briefs, a bull and a hundred and thirty-four years to become a religious order, ran houses from Havana to Oaxaca, and was suppressed by the Spanish Cortes. Its nineteenth-century Mexican chronicler calls it exclusively Mexican - and says it made little progress.