The Hospital del Amor de Dios (Mexico City, 1540), the house for the patients no hospital would take
A hospital opened in Mexico City by the first bishop for sufferers of the venereal disease, who by his own account were received in no hospital of the city and died on the roads and in the Indian towns. Its founder's letter of 1540, the royal grant of November 1540 and the foundation instrument of 1541 are printed; so is the auction of three of its houses to pay a private debt of the same bishop. It ran for more than two centuries.
Why this wins its question: Sources that mention this hospital at all give a date and a founder. What decides whether it mattered is the admission rule and the money, and both are quotable here: a bishop's letter of 17 April 1540 saying the patients were taken in nowhere, not even at Cortes's hospital, and were dying on the roads; a foundation instrument of 13 May 1541 admitting the venereal sick and anyone else with any illness whatever; a royal grant of 29 November 1540 that made the bishops permanent administrators without salary. Set against that, the same volume prints the encomienda revenue that paid for it, an editor's note that the founder's own sentence can be punctuated two ways, and the auction of three of the hospital's houses to satisfy the founder's private debt. That combination - the charity, its funding source and its looting, all from the documents - is not available anywhere else in reach.
Claims
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The founder describes the need in his own words, in a letter of 17 April 1540 printed in the documentary appendix of the 1881 biography: he has built a large house where at present the sick of bubas and other contagious patients are received and cured, whom nowhere would take in, not even in the hospital of the Marques - the Marques del Valle being Cortes, whose hospital foundation in the city is meant - and, since the disease is abundant there, many were dying in despair along the roads and in the towns of the Indians.
In the same sentence the letter records where the money came from, and the reading is contested inside the source itself. The bishop writes of having more than three thousand pesos in cattle and farming enterprises in the pueblo of Ocuituco, granted to him for his life, and of having built the house. The nineteenth-century editor prints the passage without punctuation, as it stands in his copy, and states in a footnote that the sense changes with the punctuation: one reading has the hospital built in Ocuituco, which contradicts what follows, and the other has it built from the Ocuituco revenues. Either way the hospital for the poor was funded out of an encomienda town's product, and that belongs in the record next to the foundation.
The biographer's narrative agrees and adds the institutional detail. The venereal disease was then widespread in Mexico; its sufferers were received in none of the hospitals of the city and wandered ulcerated and crippled until they died without help. Part of the tithes had been assigned to hospitals by the Ereccion of the church, and as there was still none belonging to the mitre the bishop wished the one he was founding to serve as such. It was given the title El Amor de Dios and the holy physicians Cosmas and Damian as patrons, and it stood on the site later occupied by the Academia de Nobles Artes de San Carlos.
The royal instruments are dated. By the beginning of 1540 the hospital was built and had patients in it; on 29 November 1540 the king granted the bishop's principal petitions - that the hospital be styled royal, that the royal arms be placed on the facade as the sign of that patronage, that the cession of Ocuituco be approved, that the bishop and the viceroy draw up its constitutions, and that the bishops should always be administrators of the pious work without drawing any salary for it. The foundation instrument was executed on 13 May 1541.
The foundation instrument fixes the admission rule that makes the house unusual: it was for the cure of those sick of the venereal disease, or of the bubas as it was then called, and of any other illness whatever. It provided a chapel with its bell and a confraternity charged with the direction of everything and the care of the sick.
The cost side is in the same chapter. A judgement went against the bishop in his tithe suit with the bishop of Michoacan, and, no goods of that prelate remaining, three houses that appear to have been among those given to the hospital were embargoed and auctioned, although the hospital opposed the sale through its mayordomo Pedro Cuadrado. The biographer - an admirer of the founder - writes plainly that it causes surprise that for a private debt of the bishop the hospital should be stripped of what was its own, depriving the sick of that income, and that the fact is that so it was done. Martin de Aranguren redeemed the houses, and a few years later they returned to the hospital's possession.
The institution outlasted the quarrel by a long way: the asylum went on giving the city its services for more than two centuries, and among its chaplains it counted priests as distinguished as Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora. Two stone medallions of Cosmas and Damian beside its main door survived to the biographer's own day, and a large painting from its staircase had by then passed to the stairway of the hospital de San Andres.