De curandis hominum morbis: a household prescription for smallpox and measles in the Nuevo Reino de Granada
An anonymous eighteenth-century manuscript from the Nuevo Reino de Granada setting out, day by day, what to do for a patient with smallpox or measles. Its author bleeds and cups in the first days, then argues that the cure is mostly water — "qué cosa más común que curarse con solo agua" — and cites a 1753 outbreak in which he says he prescribed no more than this and one or two people died. The modern editors publish it and decline to vouch for it.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of medicine in colonial Spanish America run to a formula — bleeding, purging, humoral theory, no documents quoted — and this manuscript is absent from them altogether. What a single household's prescription actually contains turns out to cut against the formula in one direction and confirm it in another, and both are here with the Spanish quoted: measured bleeding with ounces specified by age and build, an explicit order to stop bleeding once the pocks appear, eye washes against the blindness that smallpox caused, and an argument that water does the whole work of the cure. Set beside it, undiluted, is the author's uncheckable mortality boast and his modern editors' refusal to credit the prescription with any pathophysiological or pharmacological foundation. The call number is given so the folios can be found.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The document is an anonymous Spanish-language manuscript prescription for smallpox and measles, preserved as folios 111 verso to 113 recto and 116 recto to 120 verso of caja 10, carpeta 2 of the Fondo Manuel María Mosquera, Archivo Histórico "Cipriano Rodríguez Santa María", Biblioteca Octavio Arizmendi Posada, Universidad de La Sabana, Chía, Colombia. It reached the archive through the presbyter Cipriano Rodríguez Santa María by way of family connections with the Mosquera household of Popayán. Its editors state plainly that neither its owner in that city nor the practitioner who wrote it is identified.
The dating rests on the text itself and not on documentary proof. The prescription refers to "el año pasado de 53", taken as 1753, and the editors place the manuscript in the later eighteenth century while recording that the dating is not confirmed by any external document. This object therefore treats the date as an inference of the editors rather than an established fact.
Its central therapeutic claim is water, argued against the interventionism of its own day. The author writes "Pero qué cosa más común que curarse con solo agua, o con poco más que agua, las viruelas?" and "sola el agua hace en la curación toda la costa" — water alone does the whole work of the cure. The prescriptions that follow are boiled water, water with a quarter part milk, barley water boiled until the grain bursts and then strained, and water infused with borage leaves and chulco stems with a dozen seeded raisins.
That restraint is not a modern reading imposed on the text: the author applies it to feeding as well, reporting that many child patients took only water or citrus water for five to eight days and recovered without being made to eat, and restricting water only in cases of dysentery. Chicken, cornmeal and eggs are the diet he allows otherwise.
The opening days are nonetheless orthodox humoral practice, prescribed in quantities. Treatment begins with one or two enemas — "la primera diligencia q se hade haser es hecharles una, ó dos aiudas" — of mallow, washed bran, crushed bledo root and unrefined sugar, followed an hour later by a borage sudorific. Bleeding is taken from a vein of the right arm and repeated from the other arm the next day, at four to five ounces for a robust adult male, three for a weak patient and two for a child of one to four years; cupping glasses are applied in the late afternoon from calf to buttock for a quarter of an hour.
The author also limits the bleeding, which is the part usually left out of summaries of colonial medicine. It is held to be useful "en el principio de la curación"; after the pocks have come out he directs that no blood be drawn "sino el con necesidad de gran calentura" — only where a high fever requires it — extending the licence to the fourth or fifth day only "en rigor de grave necesidad".
The care of the eruption is nursing detail rather than pharmacology. Mature pocks are to be pricked with a pin that is not iron, wiped with a warm cloth and dressed with weak brine mixed with raw bean and lentil flour; the throat is gargled with barley and plantain with citrus juice; the eyes are washed with rose water and plantain collyria against blindness, one of the commonest sequelae of smallpox.
The plants named are identifiable and mostly Old World. The editors identify plantain as Plantago major, used for gargles, eye washes and topical application; borage as Borago officinalis, used as a sudorific; and chulco as Oxalis corniculata, used against fever and for sores of the lip, gum and tongue; with barley and mallow as decoction bases. A prescription written in the Andes for an American epidemic is filled largely from the European materia medica.
The author offers one case history as his evidence, and it will not carry the weight he puts on it. He writes that in 1753 there were many smallpox cases and that he prescribed nothing more than what is written here, and that "de tantos Variolosos como hubo solo murió uno, í otro" — of so many only one or two died — adding that in those the disease showed malignancy from the start. The editors decline to treat this as epidemiological data: neither the denominator, the selection of patients, nor the outcome can be checked.
The editors' own verdict is unflattering and is part of the record. They describe the contents as elementary treatments made from natural products with "poco fundamento médico, especialmente sobre las bases fisiopatológicas y farmacológicas", note that nothing in the prescription acts on a viral disease, and allow only that several ingredients plausibly relieved symptoms — plantain as an anti-inflammatory, citrus for the throat, borage for the skin, the last carrying alkaloids now known to be potentially hepatotoxic.
The epidemics the manuscript addresses were recurrent and are still not fully counted. A 2025 chronology of measles in the territory of present-day Colombia records outbreaks from 1559 at Tunja onward, including epidemics of 1618 to 1621 at Bogotá reported to have killed twenty per cent of the tributary indigenous population, and eighteenth-century outbreaks including "el gran sarampión" of 1749 among the Desana. Its authors state that colonial epidemics are under-recorded and that their reconstruction rests largely on secondary historical literature, which is why the figure is given here with low confidence.