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.
Why this wins its question: The foundling house at Santa Fe appears in English, when it appears at all, as a clause in a list of Quiroga's good works — "hospitals, schools, a foundling home" — with nothing behind it. This object quotes the two printed passages that carry it, from the 1649 Madrid sheets and the 1766 Mexico ones, including the proclamation that a mother who would not raise her child should bring him to the hospital. It then does the thing the list never does: it prints why the house was needed, in the source's own words — children found drowned in the canals of Mexico at dawn, one explanation being the desperation of subjection and the settled one destitution — and it prints the source's admission that the work ceased when the cause did. It also flags that the school attached to it shares its name with a wholly different college in Michoacán, a confusion the seventeenth-century chronicle itself created.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
What the institution was. At the pueblo of Santa Fe near Mexico there stood, besides the hospital for the sick that Santa Fe de Michoacán also had, "un Brephotrophio, que llamaban los Griegos, que es tanto como lugar donde se cuidan los infantes, y aqui se llamò el Hospital de la cuna". The description of its working is concrete: "Este era un lugar donde se exponian los Niños: se baptizaban, si no lo estaban: se criaban, y alimentaban por Amas destinadas para esto, y assalariadas: finalmente se les daba de vestir todo el tiempo que era necessario, hasta que llegando à edad, se aplicaban à los exercicios, que en lo successivo se les daban à todos los hijos del Pueblo." Salaried wet-nurses, clothing, and then the same work as every other child of the town.
An independent printed witness a century earlier, and it adds the publication order. Gil González Dávila, the crown's chronicler of the Indies, writing in Madrid in 1649 about Santa Fe two leagues from the Audiencia of Mexico, records that there "fundò el Obispo vn Hospital de la Cuna, donde se crian niños hijos de Indios, publicàdo primero, que la madre que no quisiesse criar su hijo, le traxesse al Hospital." The house was proclaimed before it was used, and the children it names are the children of Indians.
Why it existed. The 1766 life states the occasion without softening it: Quiroga learned, "y esto mismo vieron con harta frequencia en Mexico", how in the canals of the city "amanecian ahogados muchos Niños Indios". Some conjectured this was the effect of "la desesperacion en que se veian constituidos los Indios por su sujecion"; others explained it otherwise; "pero por ultimo se averiguò, que el verdadero origen de esta fatalidad, era la miseria, y pobreza tan extrema de aquellas Madres, que no bastandoles aun para su sustento lo que llegaban à alcanzar con sus fatigas, les anticipaban à sus hijos la muerte, que les avia de dar la hambre con el tiempo." Both explanations are printed; the subjection is the first one named, and it is named in the founder's own devotional biography.
The detail that fixes the account to a source rather than to a tradition. The same passage says the practice fell particularly on those women "que por una fecundidad infeliz parian mellizos, que en su lengua llaman Coates", and adds that Quiroga himself "lo insinùa [...] assignando la causa en su testamento" — that is, the explanation is attributed to a clause of the founder's own will, which this object has not read. Confidence is set accordingly.
How it ended, in the source's own words, and they are not triumphalist: "Ya se vè, que cessando esta, no es mucho cessasse obra tan util, è importante para aquel tiempo." The cradle-hospital was a response to a condition, and when the writer judged that condition past, the work stopped. No register of how many children passed through it is given on the page, and none is claimed here.
What stood beside it. Santa Fe also had "un Colegio Seminario de Indios, que alli fundò: diòle el titulo de S. Nicolàs; y el fin, de que alli los hijos de los Naturales del Pueblo, ò educados en su cuna, aprendiessen à leer, y escribir, el canto llano, y à tocar diversos instrumentos musicos, cuyas habilidades empleassen despues en el culto de Dios, y de su Iglesia" — so the children raised in the cradle-hospital had a school to go on to. The 1649 chronicle describes the same house from the other end of the century: "Ivnto à èl fundô vn Colegio (dedicado à San Nicolas) para muchachos Indios, donde son enseñados à leer, y escriuir, y Canto Llano, Canto de Organo, y todo genero de instrumétos, y vn Hospital donde se curan enfermos. En esto gastò su hazienda siendo Oydor."
Its fate, and the comparison the source itself draws. Moreno places the Santa Fe seminary alongside "el que al mismo tiempo fundaba en Tlatelolco el Sr. Fuenleal, con el titulo de Santa Cruz", and says it "tuvo la misma suerte que este de que hablamos, borrandose por las injurias del tiempo, aun de la memoria de los hombres". He cites for it fray Juan de Grijalva, book 1 chapter 9, and Gil González at page 111 — the page read here.
A caution against a real confusion in the printed record. This Colegio de San Nicolás, for Indian boys at Santa Fe de México, is not the Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo that Quiroga founded at Pátzcuaro and that moved to Valladolid in 1580; the two carry the same dedication and the same founder, and the seventeenth-century chronicle conflates them. Anyone tracing "Quiroga's Colegio de San Nicolás" through the older literature has to establish which of the two a page means before using it.
The limits of the evidence, stated rather than left implicit. Neither witness is a document of the institution: one is the crown's own Coronista Mayor writing in Madrid from relations sent to him, the other a devotional life written by the rector of the college Quiroga founded and printed by that college two centuries after the events. Neither gives a foundation date for the cradle-hospital, a count of children, a rule, or an account of its funding, and no such figure is asserted here. What the two do establish, independently and a century apart, is that such a house existed at Santa Fe and what it was said to do.