Vasco de Quiroga's pueblos-hospitales of Santa Fe (New Spain, 1530s)

Two settlements founded near Mexico City and in Michoacán by a judge of the second Audiencia who paid for them out of his own salary, governed by written ordinances that fixed a six-hour common working day, distributed the product by household need, elected their own officers by annual rotation, and kept a salaried physician, surgeon and apothecary. The ordinances survive because the college Quiroga founded printed them in 1766 — a partisan publisher, and that is stated here.