Recent colonial studies by Mexican historians are noted for their effective use of archival materials and careful selection of economic, social, and institutional topics. Carmen Venegas Ramirez’s short study (134 pages of text) of Indian hospitals in New Spain is a modest contribution to this growing tradition of professional scholarship.
While the topic would seem to offer an opportunity to explore the Indian side of colonial history through such subjects as Indian diseases over an extended period and Indian participation in a colonial institution, the documentation consulted does not permit more than a general administrative study. The author documents impressive activity in the establishment of Indian hospitals in the late sixteenth century as a sequel to the great period of church construction by the Franciscans, Augustinians, and Dominicans, followed by a steep decline in this activity in the eighteenth century. In addition to establishing such chronological benchmarks for the administrative history of Indian hospitals, there is a good descriptive account of the Hospital Real de San José in Mexico City, based on unpublished records in the archive of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. This hospital also has received systematic attention in a U.S. doctoral dissertation that apparently was not available to Venegas (David A. Howard, “The Royal Indian Hospital of Mexico City,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1971). The archival research for both of these scholarly studies was limited to I.N.A.H. and the administrative sections of the Archivo General de la Nación, also in Mexico City. If a social and medical history of Indian hospitals can be written, it will have to be based on the records of the Hospital Orders, such as the Bethlemites, and on a diligent survey of municipal archives in towns where Indian hospitals existed.
The nine brief chapters on pre-Columbian medicine, epidemics, establishment of Indian hospitals, descriptions of various hospitals (four chapters), and legal and moral considerations cover a wide front but are loosely strung together. Miscellaneous data on such subjects as the types of employees, their salaries, the costs of running a hospital, and Indian diseases appear in several unrelated chapters. Two unifying themes are implied or mentioned in passing but not developed: the Indian hospital as a “center of transculturation” (p. 40); and hospitals as instruments of colonization, as well as medical and social service institutions.
