The 1714 inspection of bishop Mendiola's body at Guadalajara: a controlled observation, a comparative argument from Egyptian mummies, and a conclusion outside nature
On 9 July 1714 a chest was opened at Guadalajara before physicians, surgeons, notaries and two royal scribes sent by the audiencia. They closed the doors to exclude a draught, used two neighbouring bishops' hats as controls, measured the arc, and reasoned from the chemistry of balsams, from Egyptian mummies and from the mineral ground of Zacatecas that the body had never been embalmed. Then they concluded the incorruption was outside the natural order, and a Tridentine junta was convened on it.
Why this wins its question: Ask what scientific method looked like in colonial Spanish America and the answer on offer is a list of institutions — the protomedicato, the anatomical amphitheatre, the mining seminary — or a claim about Scholastic obscurantism. This object gives a scene instead, from five pages nobody quotes: a room in Guadalajara in July 1714 where a crown protomedico trained at Paris, three physicians of the university of Mexico and two surgeons close the doors to exclude a draught, use two neighbouring bishops' hats as a control, measure the arc and the drop of a suspended object, predict the signs an embalmed body would show and record their absence, compare against the mummies of Egypt and Europe, and reason from the sulphurous vapours and damp springs of the ravine at Zacatecas to what that ground does to a corpse. It is a real piece of controlled observation, and it ends in a declaration that the thing is outside nature. The object prints both halves, names the one hypothesis the panel never tested, and adds the chronicler's own admission that the practice which produced the phenomenon was inconsistent and its origin unknown to him. It also gives what a reader cannot otherwise get without the volume: the names, the offices, the dates of the Tridentine procedure, and the royal court that sent two scribes up a ledge to check.
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 event and its record. Page 222 opens chapter XLIV, headed as the inspection of the cadaver, which was found incorrupt at the end of a hundred and forty years, and the declaration as miraculous of the incorruption and of the movement of his hat. It records that at the instance of D. Juan de Olivar it was ordered in the year 714 that a new inspection be made of the body of the venerable bishop Mendiola, and that the author, to individuate the circumstances, availed himself of the certifications of the notaries and the depositions of the physicians and surgeons. All agree that on the ninth of July, at ten in the day, the chest was opened, and the body lay open for the space of a quarter of an hour. What follows in this entry is therefore a chronicler of 1742 rendering a dossier of 1714 and 1715 that he says he had before him; the dossier itself was not seen.
The observation of the hat is the part of the proceeding that deserves the name of an experiment, and every element of it is on the page. Page 222 records that from the point the chest began to be opened the hat began to move; that it hangs by the middle of its crown from one end of a white linen ribbon whose other end is fixed to the cornice, in the corner of the church on the left side; that it formed an even circle in a compass of six cuartas; that the doors were then closed to see whether the air caused the movement; that they went up and no person was seen; that the window glazing was noted to be well fitted; that the ribbon was five varas long and the hat hung nine varas above the pavement; and that when the chest was closed and taken through to the sacristy for the inspection of the cadaver, the movement ceased. Page 225 adds the control that makes it an argument rather than a wonder: the hat is on an equality with two others, and they reason that a corporeal thing does not move without another to lend it motion, and that if it were the air it would strike the others equally. This is exclusion of an alternative cause by closing the room, checking for a human agent, measuring the arc and comparing against two neighbouring objects of the same kind — and it was done in a Mexican cathedral in 1714 on behalf of a devotional cause.
The civil power supplied the verification, which is worth separating out. Page 221 records that by the real audiencia it was ordered that two royal scribes who were present, Diego de la Sierra y Duenas and Antonio de Ayala Natera, should climb up to that cornice to see whether any natural impulse moved the hats, and that they certified they had recognised no cause of the movement other than the entering of the body into the chest, since as soon as it was closed they remained in the quiet they had before; and that they added that the hat held to be Mendiola's made a greater movement than the other two, held to be those of D. Juan Ruiz Colmenero and of Garabito, which are at its two sides. A royal court ordering its own scribes onto a ledge to inspect the physical set-up of a claimed miracle, and their certificate entering the ecclesiastical file, is the ordinary machinery of the Indies doing something it is not usually shown doing.
The medical panel and its resolution are named. Pages 222 and 223 record that the physicians and surgeons who returned to the sacristy were D. Juan Bautista Procopio de Cueto, doctor in medicine of the university of Paris, physician of the chamber of His Catholic Majesty, protomedico of his royal armies and physician of New Spain; D. Domingo Guerrero, D. Pedro Perez and Nicolas Juarez, likewise physicians graduated in the university of Mexico; and Blas Rincon and Juan Martinez, surgeons. They disputed on the state of the cadaver and the movement of the hat, and resolved that the cadaver had not been embalmed, that it was incorrupt and outside the natural order, and that it was not and could not be from a natural cause. Page 223 records that all the foregoing was certified by a body of notaries and scribes including the secretary of the chapter, two ecclesiastical notaries, a royal scribe and two lay notaries. The composition matters as much as the finding: a European-trained crown protomedico, three university-graduated physicians and two surgeons, with the notarial apparatus that made their words a document.
The reasoning against embalming is the strongest piece of natural philosophy on these pages and it is comparative. Page 223 records the notaries' observations that the tongue was whole and stuck to the teeth, and their supposition that the laceration of the ventricle was caused when the body was taken from under the earth and, placed on a mule, received unavoidable violent movements, or was attributable to relic-taking motivated by the piety of private persons; and their affirmation that the body was not embalmed, that the skull was not opened, the brains not taken out, the tongue and eyes left in their places, the nose and mouth open and empty of everything not belonging to them, and no incisions or scarifications anywhere. Page 224 carries the argument proper: that the flesh being docile, of medium consistency, white and smooth, it must be inferred there were no preservatives against the voracity of time and the natural laws, because aromatics and balsams by their salts compress the tissue of the substances and unite them so that the sulphurous particles in them make everything solid and without flexibility in the articulations, leaving a dry, black, odorous and confused mass in which the features are blurred and the extremities effaced, representing an unfinished effigy in which nothing is perceived but the disposition of the sculptor, as is seen in the ancient and recent mummies of Egypt and of all Europe; and that as for merely superficial treatment, experience teaches that external unctions alone do not serve if the cadaver was not eviscerated. The method is to predict the signs an embalmed body would show and to look for them. The signs were absent, and that part of the reasoning is sound.
One physician then reasons from the ground and the climate, in the first person, and the passage is the reason this entry exists. Page 224 records that after having attended six months in the city of Zacatecas and cured various grave illnesses there, he observes that its temperament could not supply the aromatics that were lacking: Zacatecas lies in a deep ravine, girdled entirely by mineral hills, laden with fog most months of the year; the earth, a little below its surface, is damp from the many springs that cut it internally; and it is a mineral whose vapours, rising with the subterranean ones, are the more apt to ferment and consequently to corrupt, since they abound in sulphurs and in coarse fixed salts, as is evident from the stench. The same page adds the argument that decides it for him: if the temperament caused the conservation, the privilege of conserving would be common to all cadavers, and we see that only Mendiola enjoyed the incorruptibility. Page 224 also asks what specific preservative there could have been in Zacatecas, barely settled, when the conquest had just ended, when the city in its present opulence has no specific but the known balsam of Guatemala and no exquisite plant is found within three hundred leagues. Page 225 completes it by refusing an explanation from the man's own constitution: it would be crassness to think that Mendiola's temperament in life gave occasion to the conservation of his cadaver, because everyone knows that nobody dies healthy. Environmental chemistry, a control group of all the other bodies in the same ground, and the elimination of a constitutional explanation — the shape of the argument is modern and the terms are of its century.
And then the conclusion, which is where the method stops. Page 225 records that from all the foregoing it is recognised that this admirable cadaver maintained itself incorrupt without any help of art, in spite of all nature and of all the circumstances that concur to corruption, so that they are obliged to say the body could not naturally fail to corrupt; and that, as Catholic Christians, they conclude by affirming that neither the incorruptibility nor the movement of the hat is natural. The inference runs from the absence of the one artificial cause they tested, embalming, to a cause outside nature, with no intermediate hypothesis considered. Nothing on these pages weighs natural desiccation of a body in dry, well-aired, mineral ground, which the physician's own description of the terrain of Zacatecas raises and does not answer; nor does anything on them treat a light hat on a five-vara ribbon nine varas up as a pendulum that the disturbance of opening a chest below it might set swinging, though the record notes both the length of the ribbon and that the movement started when the chest was opened and stopped when it was closed and carried away. This entry does not adopt the panel's conclusion. It states that the observational discipline they brought to the question was real, that they applied it to exactly one of the available hypotheses, and that the gap between the two is the interesting thing about the document.
The procedure that followed is a working instance of Tridentine practice in the Indies, with dates. Page 225 records that further ecclesiastical and secular witnesses were examined, among them D. Toribio Rodriguez de Solis, of the Order of Santiago, governor and captain general of the kingdom of the Galicia and president of the royal audiencia, and the licenciado D. Jose Montero, canon of that holy church, who unanimously testified to having seen the cadaver incorrupt and the movement of the hat; that by a writing presented by D. Juan de Olivar it was asked that the matter be declared miraculous and that for that purpose expert and pious men be named, in conformity with the Holy Council of Trent; that the cathedral chapter and the secular council of the city both appeared as parties, through a canon and through a perpetual regidor respectively, and asked for the same declaration; that the papers were passed to the promotor fiscal, D. Diego de los Rios, who answered that no objection presented itself to him against the petition; and that on 21 June 715 the bishop, Fr. Manuel de Mimbela, ordered that in conformity with what the said holy Council disposes, a junta should meet in his palace on 5 August, composed of four doctors named on the page and the prelates of the religious orders of Santo Domingo, San Francisco and San Agustin. An adversarial fiscal, named experts, a dated summons and a written pleading are the machinery of the thing, and they are the part of it that can be described without endorsing its object.
The chronicler himself suspends judgement on the central circumstance, which is worth recording because it is a criollo lawyer declining to press an advantage. Page 221 records that he has not been able to investigate the origin and motive of hanging Mendiola's hat on the cornice and not those of the bishops who immediately succeeded him down to Colmenero; that if having died outside the city were held the motive for conserving his memory, Maraver too had died in the city of Mexico and no such diligence was made for him, as neither was this demonstration made for the other bishops who succeeded Mendiola; and that he therefore suspends judgement and only infers that God wishes to show how pleasing these venerable prelates were to him. He is not a sceptic and the sentence he ends on is devout, but the observation he makes against himself — that the practice was inconsistent and its origin unknown — is real and was not required of him.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 221 to 225 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. The notarial certifications and medical depositions of 1714, which are the actual documents, were not seen either: they are known here only as this chronicler renders them, and he states on page 223 that where the physicians and the notaries differ in their terms he has preferred the notaries' words as closer to ordinary speech, so the medical language quoted is at one remove from the men who used it. Nothing here establishes who Mendiola was beyond his being a bishop of that church, when he died, how the interval of a hundred and forty years is computed, what the junta of 5 August 1715 decided, whether any cause proceeded to Rome, or what became of the body afterwards. The names of the panel and of the officers are transcribed from the page and no external record has been checked against them. The reading of natural mummification in dry mineral ground and of a suspended hat as a pendulum, in claim seven, is this entry's own and is not taken from the source; it is offered as an unexamined alternative and not as a demonstration of what happened.