Caring for Bodies or Simply Saving Souls: the emergence of institutional care in Spanish Colonial America

Summary

During the early 16th century, the recent appearance of institutions specializing in care in Europe spread to the Americas. Unlike our modern perceptions of these healthcare institutions where you can seek help for illnesses that affect the body, the colonial period institutions were primarily run by religious groups and may have been more preoccupied with providing spiritual care for the indigenous populations. While this divergence of caring for bodies to caring for the souls may seem contradictory from our modern perspective, it had important consequences for the broader social transformation that occurred during the early colonial years in which the local population was understood to be on an equal level with Europeans and therefore worthy of all kinds of care. This paper analyses this emergence of institutional care through examination of the Hospital Real San José de los Naturales, the first royally sponsored hospital for the indigenous population in New Spain. Utilizing both ethnohistorical sources and skeletal remains recovered from the within the architectural remains of the hospital, I will highlight how the idea of care and how adequate care is characterized at certain times and in certain places may in fact be disembodied.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Building a Bioarchaeology of Care

Keywords

Spatial Coverage