The hospitals Guadalajara did not have (1742): a colonial lawyer's case for an asylum and a women's hospital
In the middle of a chronicle of conquest, a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara stops reporting what exists and argues for what does not: a hospital for the mentally ill of both sexes, whom the hospitals turn away for disturbing other patients and one of whom is in the city jail for a killing; and one for women, whose ward at the royal hospital is staffed by hired attendants with no stake in them. His model is San Hipolito.
Why this wins its question: The history of psychiatric provision in the Spanish world is usually told as two points on a line: Valencia 1409, the first hospital in the West built for the mentally ill, and the Order of San Hipolito at Mexico. This object supplies the argument in between, from a provincial capital, in the voice of a layman with no institutional stake — three pages in which a 1742 chronicle of conquest stops narrating and makes a case: that mentally ill men and women were living in the streets of Guadalajara, that the existing hospitals excluded them for an operational reason he states, that the boys of the city tormented them, that one man was in the jail for a killing committed while ill, that the model to import was San Hipolito, and that a poor woman's house at Mexico had grown into a well-supplied hospital from a single patient. It then carries the second half almost nobody reaches: a women's hospital, argued from the observation that the women's ward of the royal hospital was staffed by hired attendants rather than by the order, and costed as a per-bed transfer out of the royal hospital's own tithe revenue — with the Bethlemite religious themselves quoted as lamenting they could not fix it. And it keeps the chronicler's own terms, his framing of the patients as a nuisance as well as a duty, and the fact that nothing here shows either hospital was ever built.
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 proposal is made as a want, not as a report, and the chronicler frames it that way. Page 435 records his wish that we might see another hospital, and indeed two or three more very necessary ones, and then gives the reason: that we see in the streets many men and women, in his words mentecatos and even furiosos, gravely in need of tutors to attend to the sustenance they do not know how to ask for, to gather them in and cover them at least for decency's sake, and to free them from the extortions they suffer at the hands of boys who with obstinacy irritate them and enrage them more. This is a description of untreated mental illness as a visible street condition of a colonial capital, written by a resident who is arguing that the condition is a public responsibility rather than a spectacle.
He states the reason the existing hospitals would not take them, and it is an operational one rather than a moral one. Page 435 records that in the hospitals they do not gather them in, because of the harm they cause in taking sleep from the other patients who need it to recover their lost health. That sentence is worth isolating: it explains the exclusion as a conflict between two groups of patients in one building, which is precisely the argument for a separate institution, and it is the argument he goes on to make. He adds that the charity of the other hospitaller religious is great, but that while they relieve the sick and hear surrendered words of acceptance from them, from these patients they are apt to receive blows if they are careless, by which they are hurt without receiving an injury — so the exercise of such charity, he says, is worthy of the greater emulation.
He names an existing institution as the model, and it is a Spanish American one. Page 435 records that it would be of great public utility that place be given to the religious of the Charity of San Hipolito, who are the ones who in the city of Mexico exercise themselves in assisting these patients. The Order of San Hipolito, founded at Mexico in the sixteenth century and recorded separately in this corpus, is here being proposed for transplant to a provincial capital by a layman who had watched what it did. The proposal is therefore not a philanthropic abstraction: it identifies a specific operator with demonstrated competence in the specific condition and asks that it be admitted to the city.
The sharpest sentence on the page is a criminal-justice argument. Page 435 records that it would be very acceptable to God that those who have the means should undertake the foundation of a hospital in which the poor dementes who suffer so much and cause harm should be gathered, and then gives the instance: that even today there is in the jail a poor man who, enraged, took his father's life. A man in the city jail for a killing committed while ill is offered as the proof that the absence of a medical institution is not only a cruelty but a failure of public order. This entry notes that the chronicle supplies no name, date, process or outcome for that case, and that nothing on the page indicates whether the man had been tried, so the episode is reported as the chronicler states it and nothing is inferred about the treatment of insanity in the courts of Nueva Galicia.
He extends the argument to women before he leaves the subject, and the terms are material. Page 435 records that as there is need of a hospital of this kind for men, the same or a greater need exists for women, who often go about the streets suffering hunger and nakedness and exposed to other greater dangers. The point is worth marking because provision for the mentally ill is usually reconstructed as a provision for men: here the same sentence that asks for an asylum asks for it to cover women, and gives exposure to sexual danger, not disorder, as the aggravating reason.
The third proposal is a women's hospital, and the case for it is a critique of paid versus vocational nursing. Page 435 records that he does not deny that in the Hospital Real de San Miguel the religious keep a separate ward for women and administer to them sustenance, covering and medicines; but that the attendance is by mujeres mercenarias whose object is the interest — hired women working for pay — and that women therefore lack the consolation the men have of holy conversations that encourage patience, and lack anyone to watch them at night, to move them, to bear with them and to tolerate the impertinences that illness brings. The comparison is exact and it is unflattering to the institution he had just spent two pages praising: the same hospital, the same order, and a materially worse standard of care on the women's side because the men were nursed by members of a religious institute and the women by employees.
He then costs the proposal, which is what separates it from a pious wish. Page 435 records his expectation that if some pious women dedicated themselves to the exercise of hospitality there would be no lack of persons to put their shoulder to its support; that physicians and surgeons would out of charity visit them; that many ecclesiastics and seculars would open their fortunes for so precious a work; and that the king would even provide that the Bethlemite religious separate, out of the revenues of his own Royal Hospital, the sum corresponding to the number of beds occupied by the women cured there. That is a proposal for a per-bed transfer of earmarked public revenue from an existing institution to a new one — the ninth and a half of the tithes, followed to its logical end. He adds the detail that gives it a witness: he has heard the Bethlemite religious themselves lament that they cannot remedy the poor attendance the women patients receive, and that it is only remediable if charitable women can be found.
His answer to the objection from poverty is a case study, and it is the most quoted-worthy thing on page 436. He tells the matrons to take on even two or three poor and destitute sick women, to lay aside the "qué dirán" and state the need they have for their patients' support, and not to lose heart for poverty — because at Mexico, he says, we saw the weak beginnings of the house of Sayago: a poor woman, wife of an official of that name, took in one mad woman, and at once there was someone to supply for her support; she took in another and experienced double the relief; and it has since been so abundant that today it is a well-supplied hospital. An institution for mentally ill women, begun in a private house by a woman of no means, is offered in 1742 as the practical precedent for founding one in another city. This entry reports the story as the chronicle gives it; the page names no date, and this object does not assert an identification with any named foundation of Mexico City.
The general argument he builds around the case is that great institutions have small and unpromising beginnings, and he makes it with local examples. Page 436 records his list: the churches of San Francisco, La Merced, San Juan de Dios and San Agustin, and the sanctuaries of Nuestra Senora de San Juan, of Zapopan and of Santa Ana Tlatic, built without a patron; the hospitals the institute of San Juan de Dios maintains scattered through all Christendom; the temple of the recollect Augustinians and convent of Santa Monica at Guadalajara, founded by a poor Jesuit; and the girls' college of the city, begun by a poor woman known as madre Ana de Jesus. He asks what funds either of the last two had, and answers that they had none but the hope they fixed in God. The rhetoric is devotional; the argument underneath it is that founding capital is not the binding constraint and that the binding constraint is somebody deciding to start.
In the same chapter he turns the argument back against the royal hospital's own history, and the reproach lands on a transaction this corpus records separately. Page 441 records his complaint that more than a hundred years since, ten thousand pesos were given from the Hospital Real to relieve a need the nuns then suffered; that had the sum been placed in real property it would by his day have yielded more than fifty thousand for the cure of the poor sick of that hospital; and that since the religious women so relieved had died and those who entered in their place did so with their own dowries, the convents owed the poor a return in the shape of admitting some daughters without dowry. He is arguing, in other words, that a surplus diverted from a hospital to a convent created a standing debt to the hospital's patients — the same diversion of surplus that the earlier pages of his own book report approvingly.
What the chronicler is and is not doing here should be stated plainly, because the temptation to read him as a reformer is strong. His categories are of his time and are not clinical: he calls the people he wants housed inocentes, mentecatos, furiosos and dementes, treats their condition as a fixed status rather than an illness with a course, and grounds part of his case in the perjuicios they cause. His remedy is a religious order and voluntary female vocation, not a public medical service, and the fiscal transfer he proposes is a charge on a tithe rather than on a treasury. Page 441 records him breaking off to say that it has not been his intention to wound in the least the establishments on which the convents of Guadalajara are founded, which is the reflex of a man who knows he has criticised powerful bodies. And nothing in these pages, or anywhere else opened here, shows that either hospital he asks for was built.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 435, 436 and 441 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. These three pages are advocacy in the author's own voice, not documents: the men and women in the streets are not counted, the man in the jail is not named, the Sayago house is not dated, and no register, petition, decree or reply is cited for any of it. This entry therefore makes no claim about how many mentally ill people were living unhoused in Guadalajara, about how women patients at the Hospital Real actually fared, about whether the audiencia or the bishop ever considered the proposal, or about what provision the city eventually made. What it does establish is that the argument was made, in print in 1870 from a manuscript of 1742, by a serving lawyer of the audiencia, and what its terms were.