A hospital in every pueblo: the parish-level health institution of Nueva Galicia and the livestock that paid for it (1542-1742)
A lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, writing in 1742, records that after a general pestilence the religious arbitrated that every pueblo have a hospital, and that in his day no pueblo lacked one — served by deputies named annually, beside a church the pueblo built, paid for from confraternity capitals held in livestock. He also reads the epidemic as divine correction and complains that those pueblos would not let Spaniards build houses among them.
Why this wins its question: The hospital of a colonial Spanish American Indian pueblo is usually reached either through Vasco de Quiroga, as a saintly exception, or through the Andean visitas, as a ruin. This object supplies the ordinary middle case in the words of a hostile-to-neutral witness: a criollo lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, describing in 1742 an institution he had no motive to invent, in a sentence that names its coverage, its annual lay officers, its building and its endowment instrument in one breath — the endowment being a herd of cattle whose natural increase paid for the sick. It then does what the devotional literature will not: prints his providential reading of the epidemic that produced the system, his aetiology of comets and black streams, his unsourced estimate that five sixths of the Indians of the kingdom died, and his complaint that the surviving pueblos would not let Spaniards build houses in them — a grievance that is also the best evidence on the page that the pueblos still had the power to say no. And it sets the passage beside the independent Franciscan inventory of 1737 for the neighbouring province, which reports the same coverage and the same livestock capitals, without pretending that two agreeing descriptions amount to a count.
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 institution is stated flatly and in the present tense by a man who lived among it. Page 156 records that the religious worked at applying to the sick at one time remedies for the body and the principal ones for their souls, and that they would have had to work more had they not arbitrated that there be hospitals in the pueblos in which the ones touched by the pestilence should be cared for; that from that time onward this provision was introduced, in such a way that there is no pueblo that does not have its hospital; that for its service annual deputies are named; that commonly the pueblos themselves build a church for it, though not the principal one, and keep images in it; and that for the cult of those images they commonly have confraternities founded, whose capitals consist in portions of livestock, which fructify for their expenses and for the maintenance of the sick. Four separate things are named in one sentence: universal coverage at pueblo level, an annually rotating lay office, a building the community raised, and an endowment in cattle rather than in rent or in coin.
The pattern is corroborated inside the same book from a different chapter and a different set of towns. Page 34, describing the pueblos of Ocotlan, Ayo, Atotonilco el Alto and Pontzitlan in the same kingdom, records that all of them have their confraternities and hospitals, and that three religious administer the three pueblos named there while eight serve elsewhere. This matters because it is the chronicler applying his own general statement to particular places he can name, rather than repeating a formula: the general claim of page 156 and the enumeration of page 34 were written about different districts and are consistent.
The annual deputies are the detail worth extracting, because they make this a lay and local office rather than a religious one. The sentence on page 156 assigns the founding decision to the religious — they arbitrated it — but assigns the running of the thing to deputies named every year, in the same breath as it assigns the building and the confraternity to the pueblo. An institution whose officers turn over annually is an institution embedded in the ordinary office-holding cycle of a pueblo de indios, which elected its own governor, alcaldes and regidores on the same rhythm. This entry states that inference as an inference: the chronicler does not say who elected the deputies or whether they were Indians, Spaniards or friars, and nothing on these pages settles it.
The funding mechanism is the one an economic historian would want and it is stated without embarrassment. The capital of the confraternity is a herd; the herd breeds; the increase covers the confraternity's expenses and the maintenance of the sick. That is an endowment indexed to a self-reproducing asset rather than to a money rent, in a frontier economy where page 34 of the same book describes haciendas of the district exporting considerable quantities of livestock and a single estate carrying thirty thousand head of sheep. It also carries the obvious exposure: a herd can be lost to drought, disease or seizure in a way a censo on a house cannot, and page 34 records exactly that kind of decay in an adjacent case, an entailed estate that was dismembered and grew others at its cost.
The occasion of the whole system was a catastrophe, and the chronicler's own account of it belongs next to the institution it produced. Page 156 records that after the general rising had been put down and its contagion spread, it pleased the Divine Majesty to correct their errors with another pestilence that came upon them, so general that without hyperbole so many Indians died that of all of them scarcely a sixth part remained in the kingdom. Two things are true of that sentence at once. It is the demographic order of magnitude modern scholarship associates with the great epidemics of sixteenth-century New Spain. And it is offered as a providential judgement on the dead, with no source and no count behind it, by a man writing two centuries later. This entry reports it as the chronicler's figure and his reading, not as a measurement, and does not use it to date or identify the epidemic.
His causal reasoning about that epidemic is on the page too, and it is not medical. Page 156 records that this pestilence so general appears to have been the effect of various signs noticed in the kingdom in the year 542: in New Spain a comet of extraordinary size and colour; at Huejotzingo in December another with three very great tongues of fire; at Azcapotzalco a spring that raised waves of water for some hours; and the volcano of Tlaxcala throwing out much fire, so that the streams coming down from it ran black and full of carbon. The same page that records a durable and practical institutional response records an aetiology of portents. Both are the chronicler's, and an entry that printed only the first would be misrepresenting the mind that produced it.
The setting is a conquered kingdom being reorganised, and the chronicle says so. Page 155 records the settlement of Guadalajara in the site it still occupies after the Mixton war, the election of its first annual alcaldes and regidores on 5 February 1542, the arbitration that the vecinos should build houses and that Indians of their encomiendas be aggregated in squads to the pueblos near the city so that they should work more easily, and the movement of the Indians of Tetlan across the river. Page 156 records that the Mexican Indians brought as auxiliaries by the viceroy were permitted to settle where they wished, that they were given lands to cultivate, that many married Indian women of the Galicia, and that their settlement took the title of San Juan de Mexicalcingo. The hospitals of the pueblos were introduced into a landscape of forced resettlement and labour aggregation, not into an untouched one.
The counterpoint that is most useful is one the chronicler makes against his own interest without noticing. Page 34 complains that the Spanish vecinos and other castes of that jurisdiction, now grown roughly equal in number to the Indian tributaries and scattered on their estates, suffer the contradiction of the Indians, who will not let them build houses in the pueblos; and that for this reason they lack spiritual pasture and their sons and daughters lack the civil education they would have had in a settled town. He also records that a proposal to found a villa, applied for from 708 and pressed to 729, could not be achieved because of the opposition of the owner of a sheep estate. Read against the grain, the passage is evidence that the legal separation of the republica de indios was being enforced by the Indians themselves, effectively enough to irritate a criollo lawyer, and that the obstacle to a Spanish town in that district was in the end a private landholder rather than a royal policy.
This kingdom's pattern converges with the independent report made for the Franciscan province of Zacatecas five years earlier, and the convergence is the strongest thing this entry can offer. Arlegui's 1737 inventory, recorded separately in this corpus, describes a hospital in every pueblo however small and confraternities endowed in livestock across the same northwestern region. Mota Padilla was a secular lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, not a friar of that province, and he was writing about the pueblos of his own jurisdiction rather than about mission houses. Two witnesses of different professions, describing overlapping territory within five years, agree on the coverage and on the funding instrument. Neither is a count, and this entry does not convert their agreement into one.
The limits of this entry, stated plainly. Everything above is read from pages 34, 155, 156 and 157 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. Nothing on these pages establishes how many beds any of these hospitals had, whether they were staffed by anyone with medical training, what proportion of the sick reached them, how large a herd a typical confraternity held, whether the deputies were elected or appointed, or what became of the system after 1742. The comparison with the Andean hospitals for Indians recorded separately in this corpus — where a 1619 inspection found most of the hospitals it visited deserted — is the obvious test this entry cannot perform, because no visita of the pueblo hospitals of Nueva Galicia was reachable from here. A statement that no pueblo lacks a hospital is a statement about buildings and endowments; it is not a statement about care, and this entry does not treat it as one.