For All of Humanity : Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala [1 ed.] 9780816532278, 9780816531882

Citation preview

For All of Humanity

For All of Humanity Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala Martha Few

tucson

The University of Arizona Press www.uapress.arizona.edu © 2015 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 6 5 4

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ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3188-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3187-5 (paper) Cover designed by David Drummond Cover art: Watercolor drawings showing stages of cowpox inoculation, by G. Kirtland. Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London. Publication of this book is made possible in part by a grant from the Provost’s Author Support Fund of the University of Arizona, and by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Few, Martha, 1964– author. For all of humanity : Mesoamerican and colonial medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala / Martha Few. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-3188-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8165-3187-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Public health—Guatemala—History—18th century. 2. Public health— Guatemala—History—19th century. 3. Medicine—Guatemala—History—18th century. 4. Medicine—Guatemala—History—19th century. 5. Indians of Central America—Medicine—Guatemala. I. Title. RA454.G8F48 2015 362.1097281—dc23 2015005383 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Keisuke Hirano

Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Medicine and Colonialism in Enlightenment Guatemala

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1. Humanitarianism and Epidemic Death

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2. Typhus and the Landscapes of Maya Medicine

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3. Constructing Colonial Fetuses

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4. How to Inoculate Indians

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5. “This Marvelous Fluid”

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Illustrations

Figures 1.

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Watercolor drawings of the left arm showing smallpox inoculation (variolation) and cowpox inoculation (vaccination)

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Maya cave with “idols” where rituals were performed to prevent or halt diseases, protect crops, and ensure good harvests

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Maya cave with detail showing a cornfield, the cave entrance, and the important cupola room with “idols” in a niche

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Image of the miscarried fetus of Feliciana Margarita Mexicanos

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Maps 1.

Audiencia of Guatemala, Eighteenth Century

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Soloma and Jacaltenango Parishes, Eighteenth Century

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Smallpox Outbreak, 1794–96

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Acknowledgments

For All of Humanity has taken a long time to finish, and I have accumulated many debts along the way. Research was made possible by generous funding from the history departments at the University of Arizona and the University of Miami; the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute, the Center for Latin American Studies, Group for Early Modern Studies, and the Office of the Provost at the University of Arizona; the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library; and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Thanks in particular go to Director Anna Carla Ericastilla and the archivists at the Archivo General de Centro América in Guatemala City, and to the Museo del Libro in Antigua, Guatemala, especially to Director Profesora Marta Julia González de Domínguez and Assistant Director Licenciada Luz Midilia Marroquín for their generous assistance. The project began while I was in the history department at the University of Miami. I would like to thank my colleagues while I was there, especially Traci Arden, Mary Lindemann, Guido Ruggiero, Jennifer RatnerRosenhagen, and Don Spivey for their support during the early stages of this project. I am also grateful for research assistance provided by Lina del Castillo, Nolan Jaeger, Carmen López, and Nick Sprague while they were students there. I finished this book at the University of Arizona with an equally supportive group of friends and colleagues, including Bert Barickman, Alison Futrell, Ben Irvin, Steve Johnstone, and Fabio Lanza, who all provided feedback at various stages. I am especially grateful to Liz Oglesby for ongoing ix

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Acknowledgments

conversations about Guatemalan history and human rights, and to Kevin Gosner, who read the entire book manuscript. This project was shaped in no small part by the smart and insightful University of Arizona graduate students who participated in my courses over the years. Additionally, I received helpful research assistance from Matthew Furlong, Tracy Goode, Ryan Kashanipour, Katrina Jagodinsky, Max Mangraviti, Lisa Munro, Cory Schott, and Robert Scott when they were UA graduate students. I owe so much to my friend Marianne Samayoa, who provided me access to the incredibly rich Narciso Esparragosa family papers, opened her home to me, introduced me to the John Tate Lanning papers at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and generously shared many archival documents with me even as she researched her own dissertation on the history of medicine at the University of Minnesota. I also want to thank the following friends and colleagues for their support along the way: Michael Brescia, David and Sasha Cook, Monica Green, Sue Kellogg, Cathy McClive, Lynn Morgan, Karen Racine, Pete Sigal, Mary Terrall, Zeb Tortorici, Natasha Varner, Adam Warren, Neil L. Whitehead, and my dear friend and archive compañera Laura Matthew who, among many other things, provided insightful feedback on chapter drafts and welcomed me into her home while I was researching in Seville. Tucson friends, who helped keep me sane, especially during the final push, include Alison Greene, Margaret Regan, Verónica Reyes-Escudero, Els Woutersen, Tiemen Woutersen, and Mo Xiao. My parents, Sue Ann and Dudley Few, have continuously cheered on this project, and now know much more then they probably ever wanted to about smallpox and other epidemic diseases. Lastly, I dedicate this to Keisuke Hirano for his unwavering belief that I would eventually finish this thing, for getting me out of my office and onto the hiking trails around Tucson, and for suggesting that we learn to snowboard together, then sticking with me until I stopped falling so much. With love. Martha Few Tucson, Arizona

For All of Humanity

Introduction Medicine and Colonialism in Enlightenment Guatemala

When a potentially devastating smallpox epidemic threatened Spain’s colonial populations in the Americas in 1803, officials from the Council of the Indies asked José Flores, a respected Guatemalan medical physician and university professor then living in Europe, to assist in designing the first empire-wide smallpox vaccination campaign in development under the direction of King Carlos IV. Royal authorities planned to take advantage of the smallpox vaccine developed in 1796 by English physician Edward Jenner. Jenner’s vaccine used cowpox to confer immunity to smallpox, unlike inoculation, the most common antismallpox technique in the eighteenth century, which introduced a small amount of human smallpox matter to the bloodstream. Jenner’s improved method propelled what became known as the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition.1 This Spanish Crown– sponsored expedition lasted from 1803 to 1806 and has been described as “the first large scale mass vaccination of its kind,” unprecedented in its global scope.2 Flores was familiar with this technique because he practiced inoculation himself, starting in Guatemala in the 1780s and keeping abreast of the latest developments in combatting the disease. Historian John Tate Lanning has gone so far as to argue that Spanish officials “singled out [Guatemala] virtually as a model” for what later became the formal Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition.3 Flores outlined his suggestions for the organization and goals of the expedition in his report to the council, drawing on twenty years of experience dealing with successive smallpox epidemics, designing and administering medical campaigns to combat the disease in the multiethnic Audiencia 3

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Introduction

of Guatemala, the area of New Spain that encompassed southern Mexico, Guatemala, and the rest of Central America.4 The mortality rate for smallpox before inoculation was astonishingly high—estimates range from 30  to 50  percent.5 Child mortality rates could run even higher, in the 60  percent range.6 Smallpox and other epidemic diseases such as measles and typhus wreaked havoc on colonial populations not only during the conquest period and its aftermath, but the entire colonial era. Flores had gained fame for introducing inoculation in 1780 to combat the spread of smallpox in the Audiencia capital Nueva Guatemala and surrounding valley pueblos, developing a program in conjunction with medical faculty at Guatemala’s University of San Carlos. He successfully secured the vital cooperation of political, religious, and economic elites, including Audiencia president Matías de Gálvez, despite a fear among some that inoculation would create more smallpox victims.7 When the next round of smallpox epidemics hit Guatemala during the 1790s, Protomedicato and Audiencia officials intensified and expanded the programs to include not only the capital but also the tributary Maya communities located far from centers of colonial power. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Flores’s medical expertise was recognized not only by the University of San Carlos, where in 1783 he became chair in medicine as the Prima Profesor de Medicina, but also by the Audiencia of Guatemala, who had named him head of the Protomedicato in 1793, and by the Spanish Crown, who awarded him the prestigious title of Physician to the King’s Bedchamber in 1794.8 Since Flores had gained these academic positions and medical titles, had a well-known reputation for his scientific and medical work, and was living in Spain during the expedition’s planning stages, he became a logical person for the Council of the Indies to consult.9 In his report, Flores wrote in sweeping terms of the unprecedented opportunity that the vaccination expedition represented, and he portrayed his own potential role in it as the culmination of his innovative and productive medical career: This agreement [to support the expedition] is the crowning moment of my glory, because it provides me the happiest opportunity to promote an easy and safe method to eradicate smallpox, and forever liberate the inhabitants of those lands from the most frightening contagions. I ask you then to listen [to] the first fruits of a medical physician, who burns with love for his homeland, all of America, [and] all of humanity.10

Flores’s reference to “all of humanity” embodied a broader Enlightenment vision of a world in which medicine, exemplified by the success of Jenner’s

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vaccine, would lead to the eradication of this and other epidemic diseases. This vision was in part shaped by Flores’s colonial experience: he had implemented a cross-cultural smallpox inoculation program in late eighteenthcentury Guatemala and had inoculated men and women, old and young, free and slave, European, black, Maya, and casta (mixed-race) peoples. Flores’s plan for smallpox eradication extended to the whole of the Spanish empire that reached from Europe to the Americas and Asia, and it presented a microcosm of the world’s population and cultures. The 1803 royal order approving the expedition, published in the Gazeta de Madrid, echoed Flores’s hope for an Enlightened imperial public health policy that would also heal the ailments of the Spanish state: “The king wishes . . . to provide to his beloved vassals the help required by humanity, and [for] the well-being of the State.”11 The vaccination expedition began its journey in November 1803 and traveled through much of Spain’s empire, to the Caribbean, mainland Spanish America, and eventually to Asia, where it made stops in the Philippines, Macao, and Canton, returning in 1806.12 While Flores did not, in the end, participate in the expedition himself, its design bears the mark of his proposals. Edward Jenner himself commented with surprise at how quickly Spain and Spanish America adopted the smallpox vaccine: Among other documents you will find one from Spain, in the form of a supplement to the Madrid Gazette, which will account for the rapid manner in which the vaccine practice was disseminated throughout south America [sic]. The Spaniards, whom one would have thought would have been the last people to take up this matter with any degree of ardor, were in reality among Europeans, the first.13

The success of the vaccination expedition forms a key chapter in the history of the elimination of smallpox as a public health threat, a process that did not conclude until 1980 when the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated.14 To date, there is no other example of a global campaign that has eliminated a specific epidemic disease in humans.15 Looking more closely at the expedition, by breaking it down into its component parts we see that the success of the expedition was due in part to smallpox inoculation campaigns carried out at least two decades before the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition, including in the Audiencia of Guatemala. And so we find the unexpected appearance of a Chiapas-born and Guatemala- educated medical physician, José Flores, who ended up playing such a crucial role in designing and advocating for the first global public health campaign for disease eradication.16 This perspective reveals

Map 1. Audiencia of Guatemala, Eighteenth Century.

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that colonial knowledges, technologies, and experiences operated here as prototypes and as major determinants of health care policies that officially emanated from the imperial center in Europe. From there, they recirculated throughout the empire through processes of adaptation, reconfiguration, and conflict. Recirculation took place along transmission points of printed material (institutional reports, newspapers, books, and personal correspondence), commodities (via trade and exchange networks), living organisms (inside the bodies of humans and animals), field experience (through the travel of European and New World scientists and medical doctors either individually or organized in scientific expeditions), and word of mouth.17 This story joins those of other historians who have turned to analytical frameworks that show multiple interactions within and between empires in which active processes of circulation become visible within larger geographic approaches such as transatlantic and global histories.18 The ground for this perspective has been constructed on the ruins of a former paradigm of European cores and New World peripheries, which had long characterized the historiography of empires operating in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.19 The center-periphery paradigm carried over into colonial Latin American historiography as well, where researchers had tended to focus on cities such as Mexico City and Lima as centers of political, scientific, and intellectual cultures in Spanish America. As this study shows, colonial Central America and the ideologies and practices of its medical cultures and early public health programs provide an excellent counterpoint to this tendency. Guatemala had functioned as important crossroads since pre- Columbian times as a junction of cultural, ritual, political, migratory, and economic networks between the Mesoamerican city- states of highland Guatemala and Central Mexico, the Petén, and the Yucatán. Guatemala was also the site of critical and formative Spanish colonial events of military conquest, religious conversion, trading, and the development of royal roads, all of which built on and extended previously established links. Under colonial rule, the Spanish then extended networks of transportation and communication from Central America across the globe, to the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This approach draws on work that over the last decade has written other geographic regions into the political, economic, religious, and gender historiography for colonial Latin America—Central America and the Yucatán for New Spain for example—as well as New World frontiers and borderlands in general. Historians who have taken this approach have discovered complicated, energetic, and at times violent crossroads

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Introduction

within and between empires where colonial peoples, microbes, and flora and fauna interacted economically, biologically, politically, militarily, and scientifically, and which has brought a renewed energy to the field and reshaped our historical understanding of empires in the Americas.20 In Guatemala, José Flores was a member of an intellectual milieu that read widely in Enlightenment-era medical, scientific, and philosophical literatures, corresponded with other scientists, followed up on indigenous accounts of the properties of various biota and minerals, traveled in the Americas and Europe, and created research projects on their own and in collaboration with colleagues. The University of San Carlos, established in 1680 and located in the capital, had a medical school from the start. Its faculty and curriculum became reenergized during the eighteenth century, producing a small but influential number of Guatemalan-born medical doctors and scientists.21 The capital’s first printing house was established in 1660. Others followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, publishing the work of Guatemala’s intellectuals, as well as translations of impor tant foreign authors.22 Furthermore, a number of the scientific and medical works published by Guatemalan authors were later reprinted in places like Mexico City, Madrid, Turin, London, and Paris.23 The university not only provided a corps of medical professionals, but its graduates, which numbered 1,300 from 1775 to 1821, formed a key sector of the public that bought, read, and wrote for the paper media at the time.24 During the eighteenth century, sectors of Guatemala’s elite that avidly consumed the new ideas in science, medicine, technology, politics, and economics converged in the founding of a newspaper, the Gazeta de Guatemala, which published its first issue in 1797. The founders and its supporters established the newspaper to print articles on topical issues, contributions concerning the most up-to-date scientific and medical news of the times, and letters from interested parties in Guatemala and elsewhere in New Spain. The paper gained a readership outside of the Audiencia, including in Mexico and Europe.25 Jordana Dym notes that the Gazeta is an example of how print culture worked to appeal to a civil society she labels Bourbon public, rather than an exclusively Creole public, and where its writers used the word “guatemaltecos” (Guatemalans) for the first time, a term that described those living in colonial Central America as part of the same homeland or patria.26 The emergence of a civil society in the Audiencia during the long eighteenth century was not an isolated phenomenon. It took place in an empire in which the top members of the governing elite were extremely mobile, took up different posts at different times in different European and New World cities, and in which members of the educated class

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made a point of visiting other metropoles and prided themselves on knowing what was going on in the major centers of the Enlightenment. Elites in important regional cities of Central America had formal ties to the Royal Economic Society in the capital, which provided a venue in which members conducted scientific experiments, participated in contests with cash prizes to promote innovation, and shared information on their medical, economic, and agricultural research findings.27 The society held public meetings every six months, and both men and women attended. The official membership rolls, however, included only Guatemala’s leading male elites. In 1799, these included the president and captain general of the Audiencia of Guatemala, José Domas y Valle; the archbishop of Guatemala, Juan Félix de Villegas; José Longinos Martínez, a Spanish naturalist who had participated in a recent Royal Botanical Expedition and settled afterward in the capital; Juan Manrique, a colonel in the regional militia of Quetzaltenango; interim protomédico (chief medical officer) José Antonio Córdova; medical physician Narciso Esparragosa; and various important Audiencia and local political officials and members of Guatemala’s clergy and missionary orders.28 The society’s published reports show that women also played an active role, even if they were rarely identified by name and none were named as official dues-paying members. From the beginning, the mission of the Royal Economic Society was “to excite the zeal of all good citizens to come together with their discoveries, their work, and their intellects to promote the good of the Guatemalan patria.”29 In an 1811 society publication, in a section titled “Public Enlightenment,” the group stated that they published the organization’s proceedings “to promote the enlightenment of the public in a period dedicated to such a sublime and worthy goal.”30 The society’s idea of the public, however, had explicit racial and class components; that is, they conceived of their “public” as the educated elite population of Central America, called in the documents “los españoles” (the Spanish): “The great idea that our learned government has had to decree the civil liberties of printed matter has had such a beneficial effect, and this principal will lead to the future elevation of los españoles.”31 Note that at least in this case, the category “Spanish” did not distinguish between Creole (American-born Spaniards) and peninsulars (Spaniards born in Spain). By the 1790s, the accomplishments of Central America’s intellectuals included the establishment of the Natural History Museum, designed to combine a study of the rich natural history of the Audiencia with a display of the wide array of botanical, animal, and insect samples found there, “and at the same time be useful to the public.”32 In a speech made as part of the

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Introduction

celebration marking the museum’s opening, Antonio Carbonel, the cathedral canon and a botanist in his own right, remarked to the throngs gathered there, “[Today] this museum has the honor of opening its doors, and [from those doors] light will also be spread to the public,” with light here referring to the light of knowledge and the light of the Enlightenment.33 The gathered public at the opening mirrored the public to which the Natural History Museum desired to spread its knowledge: the political, religious, military, scientific, and intellectual elite who participated in the Audiencia’s Enlightenment culture. On opening day, the most important guests first gathered at the presidential palace: the president of the Audiencia of Guatemala and his daughter, María Josefa Domas y Alcalá, identified only as “la Presidenta,” along with her entourage of “many other women”; the oidores and their wives, and the archbishop. This group then proceeded to walk together from the palace through the streets of the capital to the building that housed the new museum. Music played by an orchestra greeted their arrival, and they were met by other interested citizens, including doctors, priests, and military men.34 Everyone then proceeded inside the museum for speeches devoted to botany and natural history. Those who attended noted that the women in the audience “paid attention” and participated in the question-andanswer sessions that followed.35 And so, when the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition departed Spain in 1803, colonial Guatemala already possessed a civil society with intellectual clubs and print media and with a university that produced a body of professionals including doctors, lawyers, and scientists who actively participated in a global Enlightenment. This sector of the elite, which had its opponents, looked to medicine as a way for Guatemala to join the other enlightened, modernizing nations of the world.36 This can be seen through the emergence and development of Enlightenment-era humanitarianism among elites who considered it their moral responsibility to apply the new medical innovations of the era to cure and prevent disease among Guatemala’s inhabitants. Colonial elites enacted these new ideas of humanitarianism through colonial medical campaigns tailored to the Audiencia’s particular needs: to “save the Indians” from epidemic disease, to “rescue” fetuses from dying in a deceased woman’s womb via postmortem cesarean procedures, and to protect families and communities from typhus and other associated “pestilential fevers.” Humanitarianism as practiced in late colonial Guatemala at once reflected the hope placed in the medical sciences ushered in by the Enlightenment and their local applications to colonial society and specific social groups in that society through public health campaigns.37

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Elements of what scholars have identified as Creole nationalism and Creole science, which included claims of intellectual (and political) equality, did not appear to have the same resonance in eighteenth-century colonial medicine as it operated in Central America; that is, it was not characterized by a promotion of Creole medicine in opposition to peninsular or imperial medicine.38 This is despite the fact that scholars have shown the importance of the Creole-peninsular divide in late colonial Central American politics, and they have also demonstrated the importance of this divide for other areas in the Americas, especially with the proclamation of the liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812.39 Antiepidemic and colonial medical campaigns were not a forum where Creole and peninsular divisions emerged as a conflict of central importance. Instead, Enlightenment-era colonial medicine shows a simultaneous engagement with local and global processes that medical and scientific elites applied through public health campaigns. By helping “all of humanity” while addressing the specific health needs of the Guatemalan patria and its multiethnic population and indigenous majority, Guatemala strived to take its place among other enlightened nations of the world. This is shown, for example, in the language used in the 1780 Audiencia decree that granted permission to introduce inoculation to Guatemala “in accordance with the practice of all free and enlightened countries of the world.” 40 Guatemala is most likely not unique in conceptualizing colonial medical campaigns during the long eighteenth century as humanitarian efforts. Comparative research elsewhere in Spanish America, however, would need to be carried out to identify similarities and differences with Guatemala in emphasis, periodization, whether they played a role as part of nationalizing discourses, and the points of engagement with global processes such as the Enlightenment and modernization.41 Taking this perspective, we cannot be surprised that Guatemalan colonial elites did not wait to enact antismallpox policies and antiepidemic campaigns on orders from the Crown, but instead produced an endogenous response to the most pressing danger to the Audiencia’s population with the tools at hand, inoculation, and after Jenner, vaccination. When Francisco Xavier Balmis and other members of Spain’s Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition arrived in New Spain and expedition representative Francisco Pastor made contact with authorities in Guatemala’s capital in July 1804, medical doctors there had already obtained the Jenner vaccine in advance of Pastor’s arrival and had begun to organize and carry out their own antismallpox programs.42 Guatemalan authorities and members of its elite had made repeated unsuccessful attempts to obtain the cowpox vacuna in Mexico, New Orleans,

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Introduction

Spain, and the Caribbean. In late April 1804, however, Guatemalan Ignacio Pavón y Muñoz, then living in Veracruz, Mexico, obtained a vacuna sample and sent it to Nueva Guatemala by special messenger. Medical physician Narciso Esparragosa and Protomédico José Antonio Córdova used it to vaccinate six children, and a smallpox vesicle successfully developed on the body of one of the children. Esparragosa lanced it and used the fluído (lit. fluid; the cowpox lymph) to vaccinate other children, and thus began the vaccination chain. Guatemala’s Audiencia and ayuntamiento officials notified the Spanish Crown that by June 16, 1804, “thousands of persons of every age, sex, and condition” had already been vaccinated, about a month before the arrival of Pastor.43 After all, colonial officials, doctors, and scientists in the Americas also had access to much the same information that medical and political elites had in Europe, and they used this to obtain the vaccine lymph and the knowledge of how to vaccinate.44 This study, then, uses colonial Central America as a case study to demonstrate the circulations of medical knowledges, technologies, and practices as they were created, discussed, and adapted within complex New World cultures in play in the Spanish Atlantic during the long eighteenth century (1680–1820). The project’s methodological approach is interdisciplinary and

Figure 1. Watercolor drawings of the left arm showing smallpox inoculation (variolation) on verso and cowpox inoculation (vaccination) on recto. Fourteenth day smallpox and cowpox. Watercolor by G. Kirtland. 1802. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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comparative, placing the history of colonial medicine in Latin America within the larger dynamic processes that inflected formal and informal exchanges of medical knowledge and material culture during the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. This was not simply a circulation of ideas in print. Rather, health care practices were articulated within the movement of people, instruments, animals, plants, pathogens, and finally publications via regional transportation, trade, migratory, and mail networks on the ground and across oceans. The form of such exchanges built on previously established religious conversion networks and personnel, and it depended on the lived experiences of male and female Spanish, casta, black, and indigenous scientists, physicians, healers, and lay persons in multiethnic cities and highland Maya towns. Disparate local knowledges created in the colonies determined, in part, the direction and substance of imperial medical knowledge and health care policies, which recirculated throughout Spain’s empire in Latin America and Asia at a pace that accelerated as the Bourbon court assimilated the ideas of enlightened governance.45 While by concrete quality-of-life standards the antiepidemic campaigns, new childbirth technologies, the promotion of fetal and child health, and other medical issues deemed impor tant in Enlightenment Guatemala’s public health campaigns were successful, there are qualitative dimensions that are harder to measure. For instance, the cultural effect of an ever more intrusive form of governance created conflicts and advanced the use of coercive methods on colonial peoples. In Guatemala, as elsewhere, the Enlightenment turn to public health in colonial settings created new kinds of material, cultural, and physical interventions into indigenous and mixed-race communities, families, and individuals. The circulation of medical knowledges also included filtering and censoring what were considered scientifically weaker views, disputes between approaches, fundamental conflicts over goals, redefinitions of valid agency, and the institutionalization of power that makes its conceptualization anything but linear. It was a process in which parties within New World medical cultures, such as those that operated in colonial Central America, could quickly adopt medical innovation as well as continue to use unproductive or even illness-exacerbating therapies. The contribution of indigenous and other medical knowledges and practices, which not only influenced the shape and scope of antismallpox campaigns but also, as this work will show, New World medical cultures more broadly, has for the most part been ignored, or when noted, represented as primitive practices or folk medicine in histories of science and medicine in colonial Latin America, the Spanish Empire, and the Enlightenment.46

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Introduction

Shepherd Krech’s insight that “to write not histories of the West’s impact on the non-West but histories of the non-West, historians and anthropologists . . . have put indigenous people acting creatively and often resistively in the unfolding dialectic between world-systemic processes and local culture” succinctly reflects a major goal of the last thirty years of the historical and ethnohistorical studies of indigenous peoples under Spanish colonial rule. This research has demonstrated that indigenous adaptation, resistance, and agency served as key processes that helped frame Spanish colonial rule, the cardinal points of which were religion and religious conversion, economic organization, politics, land tenure, and gender and family life. This study advances this theme to include the intellectual organization of New World medical cultures by showing how Mesoamerican medical cultures interpellated the theory and practice of medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala. To uncover this history, I have employed anthropological and historical methodologies, in conjunction with gender studies, to create an interdisciplinary analytic frame for the history of medicine under colonial rule. Elite supporters promoted and legitimated the new Enlightenment medicine as modern, rational, and scientific in Spanish America by creating a discourse that, at the same time, constructed Mesoamerican medical cultures in terms of practices of idolatry, human sacrifice, and the occult, terms inherited from the Church. Yet beneath these discourses colonial and Mesoamerican medicine coexisted and intertwined in complicated and generative ways throughout the colonial period. There are few indigenous voices in the sources, however, that speak directly to the extent and operation of Mesoamerican medical cultures under Spanish colonial rule. Those sources that do contain firsthand reports and descriptions are often located within the documents generated by the criminal and religious prosecution of Maya medical specialists who somehow became tangled in the institutional grasp of the Church, local authorities, the Audiencia, or the Protomedicato. Or we find accounts of indigenous healers being consulted by the multiethnic sick and their families, Spanish elites, and European travelers (all groups that used them) without any countering first-person narratives produced by indigenous medical specialists themselves. A close reading of the historical records, however, such as postmortem cesarean manuals and instructions, smallpox inoculation manuals and other antiepidemic manuals and guides, colonial era histories, newspaper stories, travel accounts, lectures to intellectual clubs, personal correspondence, inoculation and vaccination censuses, and other archival records utilized in this study, reveal the rough contours of robust, identifiably Mesoamerican medicinal cultures with distinct types of medical specialties. I use

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the phrase “Mesoamerican medical cultures” in this study specifically to indicate that there was not one culture of Mesoamerican or indigenous medicine but overlapping practices that varied by Maya ethnic group and by environment, practices influenced by both illnesses that people in that area succumbed to and geographic and cultural-based knowledge of plant, herbal, and animal-based medicaments that mediated disease symptoms or offered cures.47 One such specialist was the curandero sangrador, an indigenous healer who practiced medical blood trades under Spanish colonial rule. Linguistic evidence for this type of medical specialization can be found in colonialperiod Mayan language dictionaries. Ajtok’ola in Kaqchikel Maya translates as “a surgeon who bled people and freed them from sorcery,” and the K’iche’ Maya word ah hut translates as bleeder or phlebotomist.48 The Poqomam town of Santa Cruz Chinautla had a reputation for its many “great [indigenous] soothsayers and doctors.” 49 Among them, Gerónimo Hernández had a reputation for the skillful use of lancets and cupping gourds to heal his patients. Pablo López, another curandero sangrador, attracted Spanish and Indian patients from the capital city Santiago de Guatemala and the smaller pueblos of the Valley of Guatemala. López specialized in bleeding therapies to heal a range of illnesses, also including the use of lancets and cupping gourds used in conjunction with poultices made from ground nettles.50 Both Hernández and López had established local and regional reputations for their skills, and both treated Indian and non-Indian patients. Domingo Martín, a Chinautla resident, noted that Hernández cured “many people, including gente ladina” (non-Indians and Hispanicized Indians) who came to consult him.51 One of López’s male patients traveled from Santiago de Guatemala to the town of Chinautla because none of the doctors in the capital had been able to cure him. López’s widespread regional reputation for the medicinal arts had attracted him: “Everyone knows him [López] from Chinautla to the capital.”52 Networks of indigenous medical specialists with local and regional reputations for their healing skills continued to practice their trades at least through the 1820s.53 Colonial chroniclers such as Francisco Ximénez also remarked that indigenous bleeders treated those outside their own racial and ethnic groups: “Among the Spanish those [Indians] who bleed well are well known. They do it so deftly that they no sooner tie up an arm and extend it so that the vein shows, and then they stick in the point, give it a fillip, and draw blood without cutting an artery. Because the point is so sharp and goes right to the vein, there is little risk. I have seen many Indians bleed, and all bleed

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Introduction

without missing the vein.”54 At the time that he wrote these descriptions, Ximénez had used both male and female indigenous bloodletters for more than twenty-five years. He became convinced that the “Indian” method of bloodletting provided qualitatively better results than the “Spanish” method: “An able woman named Juana Cordero bled me, and I say how many advantages that this method of bloodletting had over the Spanish method. Whenever I am in [Maya] pueblos and need bloodletting, I always use an Indian, and all of them have bled me well.”55 Here and elsewhere indigenous bloodletters are described as quick and efficient, leaving no time for the arm to move or jerk while the cutting takes place, so that even those he characterized as “fussy women” consulted them.56 Even sympathetic observers such as Ximénez, however, lumped these medical practices together as “Indian.” Thus, in the process of interpretation and assimilation, complicated and multifaceted Mesoamerican medicinal cultures and therapies were collapsed into the category of “Indian,” even though they might represent a wide range of ethnic groups of healers who had specialized knowledge of medicinal plants and herbs from various environmental regions or ecosystems. Mesoamerican healers plied their trade within the scene of heterogeneous New World medical cultures that operated in Central America to the end of the colonial period and beyond. It is a mistake, however, to overemphasize the peaceful coexistence of different medical cultures, as indigenous medical cultures were the specific target of attack for idolatry, sorcery, and other “diabolical arts” as the Spanish categorized them, throughout the period of the Church focus on social control during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment-inspired attacks on Mesoamerican medicine, which included the labeling of popular and indigenous practices as superstitious, or as causing rather than curing illness, framed the changing tensions among New World medical cultures in contrast to the supposedly more rational methods of a modernizing colonial medicine that presented its therapies as based on causative physiological inquiry validated through experiment. My intention is to question and break apart this still powerful paradigm by seeking the many ways the concept of “colonial medicine” absorbed and responded to indigenous, religious, gendered, and local medical cultures even as it may have presented itself as the autonomous product of peninsular and Creole elites connected to European metropoles. This includes highlighting the role of indigenous and other unlicensed and practically trained participants in colonial medicine writ large, whose role has tended

Medicine and Colonialism in Enlightenment Guatemala

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to be characterized in colonial sources and traditional histories as unscientific and superstitious. My research draws on recent work in history and medical anthropology by, among others, Paul Kelton on North American Indian medical cultures, Warwick Anderson on Pacific Islanders, and David Sowell on nineteenth- century Andean healers, research that has called for taking indigenous knowledges and epistemologies seriously in colonial and imperial histories of science.57 This area of research has been especially robust for colonial Africa, India, and the Pacific Islands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it has been slow to gain traction in histories of medicine in colonial Latin America from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.58 The interactions between colonial medical, political, and religious elites who initiated the antismallpox campaigns in Maya pueblos and multiethnic communities helped shape the predominant medical culture in Guatemala as it was emerging from colonial status in the eighteenth century. Indian, black, and mixed-race populations sometimes adopted and modified colonial health policies and medical campaigns, but they also sometimes covertly resisted them by hiding children from inoculators, fleeing from them, or fighting against them to a degree that necessitated the military occupation of some communities and the prosecution, physical punishment, and jailing of indigenous elites who refused to submit to health care programs. In the face of these different forms of resistance, personnel engaged in antiepidemic campaigns had to account for the perceptions of Indigenous peoples, which meant negotiating with Indian agents such as medical specialists, village leaders, heads of households, and parents who had significant influence on local and indigenous health care. Under the stress of open or covert resistance, early public health campaigns often had to make tacit and even at times explicit concessions to the complicated nature of local medical cultures. In so doing, new methods of health care delivery and improvised cross-cultural techniques emerged amid the interactions of imperial and New World medical knowledge. Formal and explicit acknowledgements of the role of indigenous agency and resistance in the midst of Guatemala’s early public health programs can be seen in antiepidemic instruction manuals and guides published in Guatemala, such as José Flores’s 1794 Instruction for the Method of Practicing Smallpox Inoculation, and How to Cure this Illness, Tailored to the Nature and Way of Life of the Indians of the Kingdom of Guatemala and José Antonio de Córdova’s 1804 Pamphlet that Teaches the [Jenner] Vaccination Method, and Distinguishes Between True and False Vaccinations: Extracted from European Manuals and Newspapers, and Adapted to the Simplicity of

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Introduction

the Indians.59 Despite the disparaging language used to describe Guatemala’s indigenous peoples, both authors acknowledge, including in their titles, that for antiepidemic campaigns to succeed in colonial Central Americas and elsewhere in the Americas, indigenous cultures, practices, and responses had to be taken into account. My analysis of the sources adds more evidence to the critique mounted by various historians since the 1970s, under the influence of a number of authors from Michel Foucault to Bruno Latour, that essential elements in the development of modern public health have been eclipsed by a preference for a history that emphasizes a set of supposedly universal Western discoveries, mostly by males, based on the perspective of Enlightenment Western scientific cultures. These historians have looked for the development of alternate rationalities underlying the local, gendered, ethnic, and hybridized knowledges with which Western medicine has been in continual contact through its development. In this framework, there are multiple, even if unacknowledged, medical cultures in play within the circulation of health care discourses and practices. Another element of interactions between medical cultures falls under the heading of the extraction and exploitation of indigenous medical knowledge. The eighteenth century is rich with instances of colonial medicine characterizing certain kinds of indigenous medical knowledge as useful and circulating this knowledge after it had been vetted, experimented with, and legitimized by Creole and peninsular doctors and scientists.60 The two doctors associated with the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition that opened this chapter, Flores and Balmis, were both medical entrepreneurs whose reputations rested, in part, on New World discoveries: in Flores’s case, the supposed cancer- curing power of certain lizards, and in Balmis’s case, the use of begonias and agaves to create a medicine to cure venereal disease. Each publicized their work in New Spain and ultimately in Europe. In both cases, the background of the cures was an indigenous belief.61 Similarly, members of Guatemala’s medical and scientific intelligentsia operated as brokers extracting knowledge from their formal and informal ties to indigenous peoples gained as part of their lived experiences in colonial Guatemala and transferring it to another Western medical scene. Mariano José Herrarte, a Franciscan (Recollect) friar, provides a good example of this process. Little is known of Herrarte’s life except that in 1784 he wrote a significant and detailed report on Guatemala’s medicinal plants and trees and their curative and palliative properties in response to the Spanish royal order of March 14, 1783, which requested descriptions and samples of useful plants from New Spain’s Audiencias.62 In seven handwritten notebooks,

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Herrarte made good his assertion that Guatemala’s Indians possessed a “secret knowledge” regarding the medicinal qualities of plants, trees, and herbs. The trope he used to present this knowledge was common among European travelers and settlers in the New World, who portrayed Indian traditional belief and knowledge as stretching back to the ancient past, transmitted unmodified from generation to generation: “The Indians possess many secrets of this nature, derived from the tradition of their ancestors, and they preserve [these secrets] for curing their illnesses.”63 This sense of the permanence of indigenous medicine since ancient times resonates with Johannes Fabian’s notion of allochrony, the idea that cultures living at the same time can still be sorted into different time periods, with the Europeans living in a “modern” time period and the Indians living in the older time period. Depictions of indigenous medicine in colonial sources tend to be dominated by a sense of permanence—there is no temporal mark on the medical techniques used by Guatemala’s Indians, or an evolution of them; rather, there is an ancient discovery that is then transmitted unchanged to the present.64 Native peoples of the Americas, of course, did not need the Enlightenment and its cultures of experimentation to experiment with medical treatments themselves, as they did, for example, in designing treatments for epidemic diseases that Europeans brought with them to the Americas such as typhus, smallpox, and measles. Furthermore, Spanish and other European travelers, doctors, and scientists had long been interested in indigenous medical pharmacopeia in particular.65 Herrarte notes in his report that he had heard of numerous cures in his professional life as a priest in Guatemala’s capital city, Nueva Guatemala, which contained many indigenous inhabitants who lived or worked there.66 He then recorded these cures out of “curiosity” (curiosidad). Like other scientists of the era, Herrarte had no formal training in botany. After reading José Quer’s four-volume Flora española on the medical botany of Spain published in the 1760s, Herrarte realized that the medical plants used by Guatemala’s Indians were generally unknown in Spain.67 “What I am reporting is very obscure and little,” Herrarte reflected, “but perhaps it can bring some enlightenment.”68 He covered not only the indigenous medical knowledge he had gathered, but also gendered medical knowledge along with so-called medicine of the poor, rural people (gente del campo) and “isolated peoples” (poblaciones retirados). Herrarte’s work, and the way he accessed indigenous and other types of New World medical knowledges through informal relationships, underscores the importance of everyday knowledge exchanges, interactions, and

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Introduction

collecting by those outside of university medical cultures, which has tended to be overshadowed historically by the more Whiggish accounts of scientific and medical expeditions. Following the clue given by such historically obscure but significant figures as Herrarte, this study maintains a broad focus on the theme of collection, expropriation, and transfer encoded in the medical knowledge exchanges that took place not only in formal and institutional locations such as the universities, laboratories, autopsy arenas, and expeditions, but also in market places, bookstores, personal homes, kitchens, sickrooms, makeshift morgues, forests, lakeshores, home gardens, and other informal settings. However, conflicts surrounding medicine in colonial settings cannot be seen as exclusively categorizable along racial and ethnic lines in a narrative pitting modernizing Western medicine against indigenous medicine, or as only divided along gendered lines between university-trained male medical professionals and female midwives. As later chapters will show, some Indians, women, and others not considered by, say, the Royal Economic Society as part of Central America’s intellectual cultures, nevertheless became actively enmeshed in Enlightenment medicine. They became brokers of Enlightenment technologies, policies, and knowledges to colonial society in ways that may seem surprising. This perspective draws on Philip Deloria’s argument in Indians in Unexpected Places that our expectations of where indigenous peoples should or should not be found in the documentary record feeds into “broad cultural expectations [that] are both the products and tools of domination.”69 Historians of the Americas exist amid a historical legacy of the hierarchies created by colonial rule and the racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes that sustained them, and the histories we write reflect that fact. Allowing the “unexpected” to act as the catalyst for dissolving worn- out explanatory models, I have tried to present the way historical sources show contradictory representations of Indians during epidemic outbreaks, sometimes depicting them as acting like “ferocious Indians” and sometimes as embracing and enhancing new medical technologies, even in the same text. For example, Francisco Chamorro wrote about his experiences in an inoculation campaign conducted during a smallpox epidemic among “ferocious Ma[m]es and Pocomames [Maya]” in Guatemala’s northern highlands. “In spite of the opposition of the Indians, and [overcoming] the fear they had for the lancet,” Chamorro wrote, “I was able to teach them the practice of inoculation, so that despite their barbarousness they had the happiness of being born vassals of his Majesty.”70 By using a conceptual premise that highlights expectations and anomalies about certain colonial groups—Indians, women, mixed-race peoples,

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and the Spanish—and placing these representations side by side, we can begin to break through racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes that existed at the time of how colonial social groups responded to and participated in modern medicine and new medical technologies, and in the process avoid perpetuating them in our own historical analyses. We must note, against the pull of the legacy of colonialism and primitivism, how Indians and other members of colonial society acted in modern and scientific ways as inoculators or as performers of postmortem cesareans. Through such examples we can bring up issues of shifting alliances, agency, and the opportunities provided through medicine for different racial, ethnic, class, and gender groups in the late colonial state. This nuanced view also allows a path to avoid oversimplified dichotomies of Western medicine and Mesoamerican medicine, and Indians as resistors to colonial rule versus Indians as collaborators with colonial rule. Finally, this study demonstrates that histories of medicine need to take a more complex view of the contribution and influence of religion, even during the eighteenth century, which has been traditionally identified as the period in which medicine underwent a decisive secularization as a major feature of its professionalization and modernization. In Spain and Spanish America, social welfare tasks, including health care, had long fallen to religious orders, which organized, administered, and funded hospitals. Religious personnel performed the duties of health care workers in the hospitals and ministered to the sick in their communities during epidemics. Between the priests who worked among multiethnic urban populations and the missionaries who primarily worked in rural indigenous communities, religious figures held significant roles as arbiters of when death was likely to occur after an injury or during an illness so that they could administer last rites. If they were present at the deathbed, they also made judgments about when death had occurred. To be sure, while there were instances of conflicts between and among religious, political, and medical elites, religion and religious specialists were generally not displaced or marginalized in eighteenth-century medicine as it began to modernize in Spanish America. Certainly in Central America this was in part a simple question of manpower—there were not nearly enough medically trained doctors to replace the religious personnel. Instead, priests and members of different religious orders took on the roles of scientist, medical specialist, vaccinator, botanist, and Enlightened savant within Guatemala’s intellectual cultures, who both produced and consumed the new knowledge.71 Matías de Córdova, a member of the Dominican order, founded the Royal Economic Society in Chiapas and

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Introduction

contributed articles to the Gazeta de Guatemala.72 In his writings, Córdova argued against Buffon’s famous thesis on the degeneration of the Americas, one of many religious and New World intellectuals, including Thomas Jefferson, to do so.73 He also wrote a prize-winning essay for Guatemala’s Royal Economic Society when it ran a contest in 1797 soliciting plans on how to convince native peoples in Guatemala “without the use of violence” to abandon their traditional forms of dress and adopt Spanishstyle clothing.74 Transforming indigenous dress, requiring native peoples to wear Spanish-style shoes, and forcing them to arrange their household furniture and cooking areas along the Spanish model was seen as another part of elite responsibility for the well-being of the colony’s indigenous inhabitants. The emphasis here, at least in theory, is on peaceful methods, rather than violence, evidence of the elite’s humanitarian sensibilities. There were religious motives for the introduction of certain new medical technologies and procedures introduced in the eighteenth century, and I include these as part of Guatemala’s first colonial medical campaigns. Audiencia officials, with the support of the Archbishop, mandated new medical-religious procedures such as the postmortem cesarean, performed on recently deceased pregnant women to extract the fetus from the uterus, and if possible, baptize it.75 When postmortem cesareans took place, they were carried out not only by surgeons, barbers, and other medical professionals and paraprofessionals, but also by priests. Priests also participated in many ways in inoculation and vaccination campaigns. During the 1790s, the Protomedicato committee in charge explicitly sought out the support of Guatemala’s archbishop for the campaign and called on the assistance of missionary priests stationed in Maya villages as cultural and linguistic translators who aided the inoculators and their retinues.76 Flores’s 1794 inoculation handbook formally promoted the role of priests in the Guatemalan colonial medical campaigns. Local priests should personally participate in the variolations, Flores advocated, “with charity and persuasion, speaking to the Indians in their own language, with love and fondness,” thus helping to ensure a humanitarian approach.77 And priests would assist the medical doctor in charge by beginning with those indigenous residents whom he knew best, especially “with the most able and capable Indians.”78 Again, here Flores provides evidence for how public health officials organized Indians into groups that were seen as “able” and receptive to new medical technologies brought by the public health campaigns and groups that were less “civilized” or suspicious of them. The importance of religion in antiepidemic campaigns is again revealed as a core aspect of public health medicine when Flores proposed that the

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Royal Smallpox Expedition explicitly cloak the act of vaccination in religious legitimacy by fashioning vaccinations in Indian communities as a religious ceremony: “What more opportune means could there be than to accompany [the vaccinations] with religion so that the [Indian] pueblo can venerate it, appreciate it, desire it?”79 Flores went even further and proposed that vaccination be accorded the status of religious rite, of equal importance to the rites of baptism, marriage, and extreme unction: During this act [of vaccination], the acolyte or altar boy should light a candle, and the parish priest should dress in his surplice and stole, then bless the child and say a prayer. Then to conclude, the parish’s medical physician, or the person named to be the vaccinator, will vaccinate the child, and the priest will say another prayer (deprecación). Remind the godparents that they need to bring news when the child recovers from the vaccination, so that his name can be placed in the parish vaccination book.80

The parish priest would maintain the vaccination book and store it with the other parish books of baptisms, marriages, and deaths.81 The town’s vaccine fluid would be carefully preserved, dried on a bit of cotton cloth between two pieces of glass, and stored in the sacristy where the sacred oil is kept, in essence treating it as a sacred substance. To fully imbue vaccinations with religious legitimacy, Flores recommended that the king obtain a papal bull to bless the vaccination process and give it the status of a “pious work,” a way “to express one’s Catholic faith and support of the Catholic Monarchy.”82 Flores’ remarks remind us that public health care was more than a technical matter. It involved a shift in ideology and rearrangement of the tropes pertaining to health as a public good. And so public health care evolved hand in hand with new ideas of humanitarianism and its connection to health, and it underpinned the antiepidemic programs, postmortem cesarean mandates, and other late colonial efforts focused on caring for the health of Guatemala’s multiethnic population in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Guatemala’s humanitarianism in part has its origins in long-standing religious traditions of Christian responsibility toward the poor, the sick, and the needy, especially as it related to health care and hospitals.83 Over the course of the long eighteenth century, while the Enlightenment philosophers undoubtedly confronted Christianity in many domains, they also took from and collaborated with this tradition as medical science and innovation came under the new bond between the rulers and

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Introduction

the governed, one in which colonial officials maintained their legitimacy by using medicine to cure and prevent disease, thereby helping all of humanity. Furthermore, the ideas and practice of humanitarianism was in part shaped by the agency of Indian elites, Mesoamerican medical specialists, and the Maya, who became the focus of public health campaigns as patients or as targets of antiepidemic programs. Medical professionals and colonial authorities adjusted and adapted to its majority indigenous population over the successive waves of public health campaigns, and religious symbolism was one strategy they used to ease the introduction of inoculation to the New World, including to Guatemala’s inhabitants. While antiepidemic and other humanitarianism-anchored public health efforts benefited colonial populations struggling with the catastrophic effects of epidemics and prevalence of certain preventable diseases, these efforts had a dark side as well. Their successful enactment absolutely depended on reinforcing and reworking the racial and gender hierarchies on which the colonial order was founded, and the means used included coercion and even outright violence. The rhetoric of late colonial public health campaigns and colonial medicine in general drew in part on the pathologization of colonial subjects, especially Mayas, constantly characterizing them as having body types, lifestyles, and diets that made them more susceptible to illnesses than other social groups, as well as practicing medical treatments described as causing or spreading illness. Efforts to prevent miscarriage and maternal death during difficult births also medicalized pregnancy and made it central to a new sense of the “fragile state” depicted as natural to women.84 This was not wholly disempowering, depending on the type of special attention women received during their reproductive years. They could be protected from violence, or they could be subjected to both increased medical attention and surveillance, as well as having their fetuses subjected to outside surveillance from conception to childbirth. Thus, medical campaigns that drew on the language of humanitarianism and its public health efforts allowed for new kinds of interventions into the affairs of Guatemalan communities, families, and individual bodies that had the effect of binding the health of the colonial subject to the imperium. Tracing the entrance and development of medicine and medical discourses of health as major ideological players through antiepidemic campaigns, policies mandating postmortem cesareans, and the government-set goal of preventing fetal and infant mortality reveals that colonialism was being reframed and the scope of governance was being extended in the eighteenth century medically, politically, and religiously. In the process, this brought the state into closer contact not only with urban populations, but

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also with heavily populated indigenous areas outside of Central America’s cities. Regular visits by medical, political, and military elites made to towns during epidemic times and their aftermath, new taxes on tributary Indians to pay the costs of medical treatments and personnel, hiring indigenous men from local communities for militias used to enforce quarantines, and increased surveillance of pueblos, families, and individuals through new censuses that tracked newborns from tributary Indian villages assessed and quantified the success of these nascent health efforts. Among the goals were to increase the number of future generations of tributary Indians as laborers, whose production would provide the necessary provision of the Audiencia’s colonial economy and the artisanal labor force as it began to modernize starting at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to new kinds of interventions into local communities, Enlightenment colonial medicine developed the means to access individual families and family members on the most intimate level, taking into its scope of information the human life cycle and bodily integrity. For instance, the state became interested in the individual’s blood stream through inoculation and vaccination censuses that make up the paper trail of this interest. The state also became concerned with the sexual history of individual women as the boundaries of death and life were redrawn through postmortem cesareans. And so, the Audiencia of Guatemala as an Enlightened state emerged not only from the confluence of the Bourbon Reforms and the reaction of Latin American political elites to the political vacuum left during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, as others have well documented. The modernizing state in late colonial Guatemala also emerged through the logic of endogenous colonial public health policies designed by local elites who, it must be remembered, were driven by interests that divided them along commercial, ideological, and political lines. With the introduction of smallpox inoculation to Guatemala in 1780, colonial medicine came to be considered by Audiencia and local elites as increasingly central to combatting disease, and it began to play a significant role in reinforcing colonialism by enacting public health campaigns that had the goal of providing protection to families and children from certain diseases, thereby giving people a stake in the system regardless of whether they had formal ties to the colonial state.85 Thus on one level, the formation of the colonial subject was an affair that included political elites at Audiencia and local levels, university-trained medical doctors and scientists, priests, and the wealthy who funded antiepidemic campaigns and participated in scientific societies. On another level, it included indigenous elites, who at times willingly cooperated and other times were coerced into

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Introduction

doing so. And it included women and their families as they experienced difficult births and turned to either formal medical doctors or those who followed the precepts of Enlightenment medicine for assistance. In this multilevel process over the course of the long eighteenth century, the paradigm of colonial governance changed through a focus on colonial medicine and health. This book is organized into the following chapters and themes. Chapter 1, “Humanitarianism and Epidemic Death,” charts the lived experiences of not only those who perished from epidemic disease, but also those who survived, to more fully analyze the historical effect of epidemics on colonial society. Archival sources describe community, familial, and individual responses to epidemics, which reveal shared understandings as well as significant cultural differences in the everyday practices of individuals who cared for the sick, buried the epidemic dead, participated in religious processions and other rituals, exchanged healing knowledges, and adapted new medical technologies such as inoculation as they faced epidemics repeatedly over their lifetimes. When typhus broke out in late fall of 1796 in highland Maya towns and threatened its large tributary Indian population, colonial medical campaigns worked for ten years in the region to combat the disease. Chapter 2 explores the way that conflicts between colonial medical workers and local communities during these campaigns reveal robust Mesoamerican medical cultures and their specialists who treated typhus patients with plants and herbs readily available in the Guatemalan highlands, Mesoamerican therapies of temascales (Mesoamerican steam baths), and bloodletting. Other Mesoamerican medical-ritual activities treated entire communities by means of a sacred geography of ritual caves and other natural and man-made spaces. Chapter 3, “Constructing Colonial Fetuses,” examines the introduction and spread in the Audiencia of Guatemala beginning in 1785 of postmortem cesareans for all deceased pregnant women for purposes of fetal baptism. Accounts of postmortem cesareans placed side by side with miscarriages caused by epidemic disease and mistreatment reveal how political, religious, and medical officials, as well as colonial subjects caught up in these cases, deployed or took advantage of the new emphasis of the fetus to gain surgical access to the uterus, police miscarriages, and make claims about which fetuses and pregnant women deserved protection from disease and violence in colonial society. Chapter 4, “How to Inoculate Indians,” explores a smallpox outbreak that appeared in southern Mexico in early 1794 and its spread along the Camino Real into Guatemala, threatening the large Maya populations in the western

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highlands, a key source of colonial wealth. Colonial antismallpox campaigns actively courted Indian political officials and community leaders in attempts to gain their cooperation and trust. The establishment of extensive, militarized quarantine lines met with mixed success as native peoples found them relatively easy to bypass. Mass inoculations held in public plazas ringed by militia soldiers raised tensions between the medical campaigns and highland pueblos, though in some cases inoculators made an effort to adapt Mesoamerican medical technologies and therapies in the antismallpox campaign. Chapter  5, “This Marvelous Fluid,” begins with the arrival in Central America of news of the discovery in England of Jenner’s vaccine, and uncovers the networks used by medical, scientific, political, and religious elites to quickly integrate the procedure into its public health efforts, describing cowpox, its key ingredient, as “this marvelous fluid.” Over the coming months, medical doctors and their allies searched for a vaccine sample, along with the latest information about the Jenner vaccine available from international scientific societies and in correspondence from their regional, hemispheric, and transatlantic contacts. These efforts unleashed an unprecedented wave of experiments conducted by licensed medical doctors and aficionados using human smallpox, cowpox, and other pustular materials, activities explicitly sanctioned and promoted by Audiencia and Protomedicato authorities. Guatemalan elites finally secured a cowpox sample from abroad and propagated the vaccine in advance of the arrival of the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition’s representative, Francisco Pastor, to the capital city in the fall of 1804. The Central Vaccine Junta, established soon after, worked to develop systematic vaccination networks across the Audiencia, with mixed success. Despite thirty years of colonial medical campaigns, significant mistrust about their methods continued to exist in local communities and in towns with active Mesoamerican medical cultures.

chapter one

Humanitarianism and Epidemic Death

European participants in New World conquest and early colonization, along with indigenous peoples living through those first waves of epidemics, considered the mortality rates catastrophic. The Kaqchikel Maya recorded this graphic depiction of an epidemic that struck highland Guatemala in 1520: That was when the sore-sickness started. In truth, it was frightening how many deaths befell the people. There was no healer for it. Thus the people peeled. . . . Truly the people stank, were acrid, in death when our father, grandfather died. Other people were thrown down in the ravine. Just dogs, just buzzards ate the people. The death was frightening; your grandfathers were being killed. They were companions in death: the sons of the lords with their younger siblings, their elder siblings.1

This description brings up some of the key themes of how inhabitants of colonial Latin America experienced outbreaks as horrifying events, along with the shared language that survivors used to describe the mass death that they witnessed. Epidemic diseases such as “sore-sickness” not only physically marked the bodies of loved ones and family members with “peeling” skin, but they constantly reminded afflicted communities of their presence by an acrid smell.2 Kaqchikel Maya healers no doubt applied palliative measures as best they could to those struck down by epidemic, but they, like European healers, had no cure. An outbreak could wreak havoc on an entire generation, leaving in its wake orphans, broken households, and 29

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fractured communities. Because epidemics caused large numbers of deaths in short periods of time, inhabitants of afflicted towns and cities abandoned death rituals and traditions, at least temporarily, which might have been able to provide the survivors a way to begin to process the devastation as individuals, as family members, and as part of a community. When so many died so quickly, the dead could be left unburied, their smells of decomposition thought to act as further vectors of contagion. Finally, the image of domestic animals and carrion birds feasting on the epidemic’s human victims during outbreaks embodied a world in chaos. The connection made between conquest and epidemic disease continued to resonate to the end of the colonial period. Protomédico José Flores, writing in the early nineteenth century, narrated the history of smallpox as a legacy of the Spanish conquest in Guatemala: “In this disaster [of conquest] the fatal virus [smallpox] struck [the Indians]. The violent fever defeated them. The fetid pus covered them, their children, wives, that did not pardon age or sex, that they believed was another weapon of their relentless conquerors.”3 Flores drew on similar images in the early nineteenth century as the Kaqchikel account did in the early sixteenth century: Indian bodies marked by sickness, how multiple generations of native peoples perished during epidemics, and the disease’s distinct fetid smell that permeated inflicted towns. Researchers whose work has focused on the demographic history of epidemics and its effects on indigenous peoples in the Americas, including the Kaqchikel Maya, have long recognized that European voyages to the New World resulted in widespread indigenous depopulation during the first century of colonization there. Europeans brought with them epidemic diseases that native peoples in the Americas had not yet been exposed to— the so-called virgin soil epidemics—including smallpox, measles, and the plague.4 They have quantified the catastrophic cost of these diseases in unprecedented population loss, causing declines of 75 to 90 percent in the population of indigenous peoples through the first century of colonialism.5 Such stark numbers have led some scholars to argue that “the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in all likelihood the scene of the greatest destruction of lives in human history.”6 For Guatemala at contact, W. George Lovell and Christopher Lutz estimate the Maya population south of the Petén lowlands at two million persons. By the 1620s, indigenous peoples numbered roughly 128,000, showing a staggering decline of close to 94 percent. Thereafter, this group began a slow increase that occurred in fits and starts, and varied regionally, so that by 1778 the indigenous population saw a modest increase to 248,000, representing at

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that time more than two-thirds of the Audiencia’s total population of 355,000.7 A major turning point for Guatemala was the introduction of smallpox inoculation to the Audiencia’s populations starting in 1780 and the increasing importance of health to colonial governance thereafter. What types of strategies did individuals, communities, medical practitioners, lay and religious sectors of society, and colonial authorities utilize as they sought to care for the dying? How did those who lived through waves of epidemics and ministered to the sick experience and deal with the mind-numbing mortality rates and the effects of watching their loved ones, children, neighbors, friends, workers, parishioners, and patients die in painful ways, often on a horrific scale? How did their worldviews change with the introduction of inoculation in 1780 and the subsequent expansion of colonial medicine to Guatemala’s multiethnic population through public health campaigns? Asking these kinds of questions pushes historians to investigate the lived experiences of not only the afflicted but also of those who survived to more fully analyze the social and cultural effects of epidemics on colonial society. Archival sources describe community, familial, and individual responses to epidemics, which taken together reveal both shared understandings and significant differences in approaches to healing, epidemics, and mass death in the lived experiences of Guatemala’s multiethnic population. These sources describe not only official colonial responses but also multiple medical cultures at play—Mesoamerican, gendered, rural, and others—practiced beside, or in competition with, official colonial medicine and organized colonial responses to public health crises.8 Such clues allow us also to uncover the everyday practices and experiences of individuals who cared for the sick, buried the dead, fled with family members to protect them, participated in religious processions and other rituals, exchanged healing knowledges, and adapted new medical technologies as they faced epidemics repeatedly over their lifetimes.

Colonial and Mesoamerican Responses to Epidemic Death Despite the more or less regular appearance of epidemics over the course of the colonial period, residents of Central America experienced them as emotionally moving and exceptional events. Local and Audiencia officials witnessed firsthand the human suffering they caused, and they advocated

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humanitarian responses to epidemics by writing of what they saw and heard about morality rates. This is an example of how scholars of humanitarianism and the history of human rights point to new ways, at various historical moments, for the inclusion of different populations into the category of “human” by forcing onlookers to mass violence, whether from warfare, famine, or epidemic disease, to consider and see the humanity of its victims.9 Colonial Guatemalan officials, local political administrators, mendicant priests, and travelers frequently describe indigenous death from epidemics as on another scale from mortality rates for society as a whole. An Audiencia fiscal writing of a 1576–77 epidemic described it this way: “The smallpox epidemic has been contagious and widespread among the Indians. Many have died, although most of them are young children.”10 During the 1607–8 outbreak of peste (epidemic), priests and others who ministered to the sick portrayed themselves as helpless to stop the resulting catastrophic deaths among Indians: “[The] widespread illness that the Indians of this land have [suffered from] during this past year has been a plague or epidemic that kills these wretched Indians very quickly in two or three days, and in some cases suddenly, before they can be helped and before [we] can administer a treatment or cure, because as one returns to health, [many] others die.”11 In a 1684 letter to the Spanish Crown, the president of the Audiencia of Guatemala, Enrique Enríquez de Guzmán, wrote of his concern regarding the high mortality rate for Indians during that year’s epidemic, concluding that “finally, Sir, the Indians are dying without any cure (curación),” calling them “these miserable Indians.”12 The San Alejo Hospital in the capital that exclusively treated Indian patients did not have enough beds to care for the epidemic’s victims, a frequent complaint during the colonial period. At the time, the hospital had twenty-four beds and needed more during epidemics because it was responsible (at least in theory) for treating the population of seventy-two nearby Indian pueblos.13 Enriquez’s experience led him to improve the capital’s Royal Hospital and then merge it with the San Alejo Hospital as a way to garner more beds and better conditions for indigenous patients.14 Protomédico José Flores, looking back at the devastation wrought by smallpox before inoculation, justified colonial medical interventions into indigenous health because of what such high mortality rates represented from a humanitarian standpoint and because of the necessity of maintaining a stable population of Indian tribute payers in the ser vice of the colonial state. Flores reminded his readers what that kind of death on a large scale was like for those who managed to live through it: “The virus advances,

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consumes, leaving everywhere bitterness and desolation. This leaves us with a present so disastrous that one third of the Indian population has disappeared. But what an important one third! Young parents and their children, two generations, that is to say, countless generations.”15 Mass death from epidemics not only referred to lost generations, but also included repeated descriptions of towns whose inhabitants had either died or whose small numbers of survivors had dispersed to other healthy communities, to their agricultural fields, or to the mountains. That is how chronicler Francisco Ximénez, writing in the early eighteenth century, described the pueblo of Santa María Magdalena: “epidemics destroyed that town, and among the few Indians who remained, some settled in the town of Cunen and others in Sacapulas.”16 Another chronicler remarked that some twenty Indian towns around the capital had declined so drastically that they had all but disappeared, describing some as “almost totally wiped out,” with others left with between seven and thirty persons “so that now they do not deserve the name of pueblos but rather depopulated towns.”17 Colonial officials described San Juan Ostuncalco, located in the jurisdiction of Quetzaltenango, as “practically deserted” from a 1773 measles epidemic and locust plague that caused some 900 deaths from disease and hunger.18 Flores drew on the familiar metaphor of the fall Eden to describe his feelings inspecting empty Indian villages devastated by smallpox in the preinoculation era: “Many times I have passed by such ruins, lingering to contemplate the beauty of the sky, the pleasantness of the country, the sun, the waters, the trees filled with delicious fruit, without noticing, in this kind of Paradise, any other inhabitants other than . . . snakes.”19 Humanitarian responses to epidemics and catastrophic death included the distribution of food, clothing, and bedding to those in need, especially in cities. Food shortages often preceded or followed epidemics. During a typhus outbreak in the 1740s, colonial officials felt that the food shortages and resulting hunger among the region’s poor had exacerbated the epidemic, and so required farmers to provide 100,000 fanegas of corn to the poor in Santiago and the surrounding valley towns.20 When a smallpox epidemic struck in 1761, officials noted that the high death rate was increased among the poor because they lacked the resources to purchase food and medicine. To address this, they distributed 3,000 pesos to the poor, with two-thirds of the funds going to the poorest barrios in the capital, Sagrario and San Sebastián.21 Tributary Indians in Spanish America occupied a distinct category of colonized subjects who were taxed but legally also deserved protection within the colonial system from overwork, mistreatment, and, when

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possible, from epidemic disease. Royal authorities and their representatives in the Audiencia of Guatemala could, at times, provide tribute relief and extra resources directly to Indian pueblos. While such relief was tied to their legal status as tributaries, directives and correspondence calling for aid during epidemic outbreaks and their aftermath also shows the use of compassionate language that advocated humanitarian responses to their suffering. Colonial officials set aside funds to aid those in need, organized donations, or took monies from the town’s caja de comunidad (collective community chest funds) and used them to provide food and medicines, clean bedding, and to mediate subsequent food shortages when crops were not planted nor harvested because the social instability that occurred during outbreaks. Local and regional officials made tribute-reduction requests as representatives of the colonial state to the Audiencia court in the capital. Parish priests could also request reductions because of epidemics in their parish. Indian communities themselves shaped this process as well when pueblo office holders asked for priests to intervene on their behalf or when indigenous elites themselves wrote letters requesting tribute relief, extra food supplies, or in some cases a new census that would readjust the taxes to account for the decline of tribute payers after an epidemic. During a smallpox epidemic in 1748, town leaders of San Pedro de las Huertas, located south of Santiago de Guatemala, complained that those who had managed to survive a recent epidemic had to rush back to the fields to produce the required goods, resulting in further sickness and death. They requested a new census that more accurately reflected the postepidemic population count.22 In response to epidemics in both urban centers and the countryside, local and Audiencia officials also drew on traditional calls to Christian piety to counteract mass death and human suffering caused by these diseases. This religious-based conception of moral responsibility toward the poor, Indians, and other colonial populations deemed worthy of assistance in times of social stress formed an important element in organized responses to epidemics at this time, when many saw medicine as largely unsuccessful at bringing about cures. The central features of religious responses can be seen in a description of a peste that afflicted Santiago de Guatemala from January to March of 1647, when “so many died that there was nowhere left to bury them.”23 Dominican friar Antonio de Molina provided an eyewitness account of what the inside of the city’s cathedral looked like during the epidemic: “I was in the Cathedral [during the epidemic] when they had to open a grave, and because the church was filled with [so many] new graves, there was

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nowhere to open one. And having identified a place where it seemed that no one had yet been buried, they began to dig. After a few shovelfuls they encountered a recently buried corpse.”24 As the epidemic wore on, a group of priests responsible for administering the viaticum to the dying traveled daily through the capital’s streets and the surrounding towns from early morning until late in the evening.25 Their actions served as a daily public reminder that the epidemic continued to rage and of the human suffering that the epidemic caused. Handbooks for priests provided guidelines for “those who treat apestados” (those afflicted by epidemic diseases) and how to read their death signs so that last rites could be administered appropriately.26 Official colonial responses to epidemics also deployed special prayers, masses, and other public displays of the ritual power of colonial Christianity, tailoring them to the needs of local populations and the specific diseases faced there. The Mercedarian monastery in Santiago de Guatemala in 1614 organized a procession featuring images of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes to halt a “general pestilence.”27 Dominican friar Molina described a series of religious observances during a mid-seventeenth-century epidemic that included a “Procession of the Blood” where Guatemala’s bishop led the ritual walking barefoot while the faithful followed behind him, carrying the image of Holy Christ of the cathedral through the capital city.28 The Dominican monastery held a novenario (nine day ritual prayer) in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary, and the religious hierarchy organized a procession that carried the Virgen de Plata through city streets, after which the friar Juan de Mesquita led a religious ser vice. Mesquita then donated “a great sum of alms” as an expression of Christian piety and humanitarianism and visited the homes of the city’s inhabitants to console the sick and distribute the money to their families.29 When the 1694 smallpox epidemic afflicted Santiago de Guatemala and the towns in the surrounding valley, Jacobo de Alcayaga, an alderman (regidor) in the capital, began a letter to the president of the Audiencia by noting the extreme human suffering that he encountered: “There cannot possibly be enough human diligence, nor enough measures [to help] the innumerable persons who find themselves afflicted by the contagious smallpox epidemic . . . so that every day many [persons], infants as well as adults, are publicly buried, not including those [corpses] that have [simply] been left at parish church doors.”30 This description and others from the preinoculation era relied on the language of human suffering and images of dead bodies as a strategy to appeal to the Audiencia’s sense of moral responsibility to counteract the human suffering and to press for aid to those in need.31 Even Guatemala’s capital became overwhelmed during

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epidemics, where inhabitants left the dead at parish church doors and officials resorted to “public burials,” most likely referring here to the burial of more than one person in a grave. Food shortages and starvation accompanied the epidemic, further increasing the stress on both the sick and the survivors.32 Alcayaga presented himself as having special knowledge that he used to explain the epidemic’s origins, blaming the “malice and depraved greed that has been introduced to this miserable republic.”33 He combined this argument with an appeal to the president of the Audiencia’s “Catholic spirit” (Católico pecho) to put in place “the most effective methods” to address the smallpox epidemic.34 At the same time, Alcayaga highlighted the failure of the city’s medical physicians to stem the epidemic and heal the afflicted. Instead, he promoted the “true medicine” of Christian piety: “We can make and celebrate a sumptuous and devoted novenario which is the true medicine (la verdadera medicina), and this is not the case for medical physicians, . . . who attend to the neighborhoods where they have no method for curing [smallpox], and the lack of medicine and hunger persist.”35 Both the Audiencia and Santiago’s city government found Alcayaga’s arguments persuasive, and they agreed to carry out his recommendations. Officials planned two religious processions. One would carry the image of Nuestra Señora María del Socorro through the city’s streets to the cathedral, where she would be placed on the high altar during the novenario. The other procession and novenario honored San Sebastián, who also had a reputation in Guatemala for his epidemic-ending powers. Audiencia and local elites contributed funds to cover the expenses of these rituals as pious acts. Public displays of the ritual power of colonial Christianity to halt epidemics made up part of the broader ideological labor performed by priests and Church officials in times of community stress that helped legitimate the ideology of colonial rule. Priests, acting as ritual specialists, led religious processions, public ceremonies, and rites during epidemics and in other instances of social stress such as drought, flooding, locust plagues, and earthquakes, all of which were part of life in colonial Guatemala.36 Not only did religious officials lead a ritual defense of the community to counter extraordinary events like epidemics, they also displayed the power of colonial Christianity to mediate mundane aspects of illness and death as well. For example, priests regularly made judgments about when death was likely to occur in the sick and elderly so that they could administer death rites and rituals.37 But of course colonial Christianity did not monopolize the use of ritual power in the face of epidemics and illness, and priests were not the only

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persons to make judgments of when death would occur. In Postclassic Era and colonial Maya cultures, medicine and religious practice were tied together in ritual activities designed to address matters of illness and death as well, and these continued to operate after the consolidation of Spanish rule. An important part of colonial Mesoamerican ritual cultures involved the divination of illness causation.38 Divination allowed a Maya healer to make informed judgments of whether the sick would recover or die from an illness or whether an epidemic was immanent; divination also allowed a healer to ensure community protection from, and expulsion of, epidemic diseases. This labor is similar to what Spanish priests and medical doctors performed for sick and dying individuals, and for afflicted communities, during epidemics and in daily life. With the arrival of European colonialism, Mesoamerican medicinal cultures adapted and created medical-religious responses to new epidemic diseases such as smallpox. Colonial sources are often silent about Mesoamerican religious and divinatory practices related to illness and medicine, or note them only in records policing them such as civil, criminal, and Inquisition documents, and so describe them as “superstitious” or “barbaric.” Nevertheless, such sources can provide important clues to Mesoamerican ritual practices targeting epidemic disease at the levels of both individuals and communities. In the late sixteenth century, indigenous accounts describing illness and epidemics were produced through the Relaciones Geográficas, responses to a questionnaire sent on orders of King Phillip II of Spain to the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in 1577.39 Local elites of the Tz’utujil Maya town of Santiago Atitlán, in conjunction with colonial officials, responded to the questionnaire and provided information about political, economic, and cultural life, including divinatory practices related to epidemics. While these responses took seriously indigenous divinatory practices, the language that described them was the religiously charged language of “idols” and “demons” that attested to the religious tensions in colonial conversion efforts in Maya towns located along Lake Atitlán. “The lords and caciques” of Santiago Atitlán, some of whom acted as ritual specialists, consulted a “demon” to ascertain whether an epidemic threatened the community.40 The nearby Maya town of San Bartolomé also used divination for knowledge about epidemics, with the assistance of a “demon,” to discern whether “that year would bring epidemics.” 41 In San Bartolomé, Indian elites selected a “chief,” likely also a ritual specialist, who ate a special diet of chicken or toasted cacao once a day and performed selfbloodletting. This chosen person then “made another sacrifice of incense

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and blood” and offered it to the demon, also called in the sources an idol, “and at this time they consulted him concerning what they wanted to know.” The image foretold an epidemic by transforming to appear “with a cord around his throat.”42 Two other nearby Maya towns also reported similar consultations of images for epidemic divination. Maya elites from the town of San Andrés consulted an image who “appeared to them stretched out on the ground with a rope around his neck” prophesizing the arrival of a plague.43 The town of San Francisco reported self-bloodletting acts by ritual specialists, including penis piercing to foretell upcoming exceptional events such as plagues and war.44 As with the other area towns, when any kind of epidemic threatened, specialists would see the image on the ground transformed to have a rope around its neck and “signs of smallpox [on the body], or any other sickness that there was to be.”45 The town of San Francisco was the only one of the four to describe the divinatory figure as “the size of a child of three years, called caquibok in their native tongue and in Nahuatl yztac tlamacas which means ‘white boy.’ ”46 Mesoamerican ritual cultures also included the ability to predict death. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, writing in the seventeenth century, observed that some Maya ritual specialists had supernatural relationships with animals that allowed them to predict death in individuals.47 “If an eagle owls cries out at night which they [the Mayas] call tecolot or la lechuza,” Fuentes y Guzmán wrote, “or if a dog digs up the ground, they say that someone in the house where [the event] happened will die soon.”48 Killing certain animals seen as protectors or guardians brought death as well: If a snake is found inside of the house, even if it is a very poisonous kind of snake, they (not only the Achis but [also] the Quichés, Cacchiqueles, Pocomames, Pipiles, and Pupulucas) do not kill them, because they say that [snakes] are guardians of the home. And if the snake is killed, the head of household will die. [This belief persists] even though they [the Indians] have seen evidence that the priests and we in our country houses kill [snakes] when we see them, and that we do not die from destroying these harmful beasts.49

In colonial Maya culture, snakes additionally had a strong association with ritual divination through dreams.50 Other examples show that in Maya cultures, the sick themselves prognosticated the likelihood of their own death. Thomas Gage, an English priest visiting the town of Pinula in the first part of the seventeenth century,

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noted that some Indians there told him of an “old woman” named Martha de Carillo who was well-known for casting illnesses.51 When Gage administered last rites to the dying in that town, many of them confessed to him that Carillo had appeared to them as a kind of apparition during their illness, foretelling their deaths: “And in their sickness [the old woman] appeared, threatening them with death about their beds, none but they themselves seeing her.”52 Here, the dying entered a special state of being that facilitated certain kinds of human-supernatural communication about an illness and if death would occur. While on the surface colonial sources frequently emphasize separate Spanish colonial and indigenous cultural and medical responses to epidemics, as in the previous example, other sources show that this division was not always clear-cut, indicating more complicated cultural intersections in ritual responses to epidemics. Francisco Vázquez, a Franciscan friar, wrote of the miraculous healing of a young Maya girl in the seventeenth century who had contracted smallpox and then unexpectedly recovered from the brink of death. In regions that were firmly under Spanish colonial control, smallpox was primarily a disease of children and young adults, that is, those born since the last epidemic who had no previous exposure to the disease. Large numbers of children’s deaths in the midst of the various epidemics no doubt caused much family and community stress and distress; however, the sources rarely describe the experiences in any detail as this miraculous healing account does. In 1680, in the town of Zamayac, the seven-year- old niece of Antonia Pech, a community elder (india principal), fell gravely ill during a smallpox epidemic that had already killed many area children. The girl became so ill that “she arrived at the point of death without hope of living.” The girl subsequently recovered, the account tells us, in large part because of the pious actions of her aunt.53 The priest advised Pech, who “loved her [niece] as a daughter,” to dedicate herself to San Nicolás to cure her. Pech then made a vow that she would serve in the local cofradía (religious confraternity) dedicated to San Nicolás for one year.54 This account can be read as part of the miraculous healing genre of Christian religious writing.55 But here the main protagonists were Indians, and Pech demonstrated her religiosity through participating in an Indian cofradía, an important local religious institution to Maya communities. Such accounts provide examples of the redemptive power of God through an indigenous woman’s love and devotion to her niece and through her dedication to Christianity in this colonial setting. After Pech began serving in the cofradía, her sick niece saw an apparition of San Nicolás near her bed, telling her aunt to come see him, “that

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he stood over there.” The girl repeated the words to her aunt “with much happiness” and said that San Nicolás was watching over her during her illness, and that he said he would cure her. The girl then asked for something to eat, and “from then on it was as if she had been rid of the sickness.” Her return to health astonished everyone “because no one believed that she would live.”56 This miraculous healing account provides a glimpse of how families and communities reacted during dire but fairly regular events like mass death from epidemics or childhood illnesses. It suggests that some did not consider child death from diseases like smallpox as inevitable, but that certain ritual steps could be taken in the hopes that the afflicted would recover. Apocryphal accounts, including this miraculous healing, show the ideological use of “exceptional Indians” by the colonial state, and by extension Catholic priests, as these Christian Indians were held up as examples to the rest of the community. Such accounts circulated informally by word of mouth and in written sources such as this colonial history. The town of Zamayac, where the miraculous healing took place, had a long history as an impor tant religious center, one that spanned the preconquest and colonial eras. In the Postclassic Era (c. 900–1521) the town was known as Tzaamayac, and it acted as the seat (sede) of Tz’utujil and K’iche’ Maya sacerdotes (priests) or ritual specialists.57 In the sixteenth century, Spanish colonial officials renamed the town San Francisco Zamayaque. The town retained its reputation as a religious center under colonial rule as well, when in the 1570s it became the site of a Franciscan monastery with a supporting tributary Indian population of 450 persons.58 During Archbishop Cortés y Larraz’s 1769–70 visit, the parish priest of Zamayac spoke to him of active indigenous ritual practices there, conducted at night, in “the mountains” (los montes), by the town’s “fortune tellers, healers, and evil-doers.”59 The priest also mentioned the existence of a calendario or almanak, an indigenous language ritual book “that they [the Indigenous leaders of Zamayac] use for their governance.”60 Cortés y Larraz described himself as “horrified” to hear of the existence of such a ritual book “that they use in all the Kaqchikel, K’iche’ and Mam [Maya] parishes, and it is the same [here], though written in their own language.”61 An identifiable Indian elite continued to exist in Zamayac during the colonial period, and another source even described the town as known for its “esteemed [Maya] nobility.” Antonia Pech was part that elite, and she participated in one of the town’s cofradías.62 We also know that in other Audiencia towns, Maya ritual specialists, as well as local political office holders, primarily came from the town’s indigenous elite families. When

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such persons appear in the documentary record, however, they are almost always male.63 Pech’s religious fervor and dedication to Christianity, then, provides documentation about elite indigenous women’s roles as well. While the miraculous healing of a girl with smallpox centered on San Nicolás, an officially sanctioned saint, local responses to epidemics also could include apparitions deemed suspect, leading to the emergence of unofficial saints in times of community stress.64 In 1650, an outbreak of the epidemic disease known as cumatz or gucumatz afflicted many of the Indian pueblos in the Valley of Guatemala.65 The disease, called cocoliztli in Nahuatl, caused residents to flee afflicted towns until they became deserted and others to completely disappear because of the disease’s high mortality rates.66 Colonial chroniclers Vázquez and Fuentes y Guzmán both noted that San Pascual Bailón became an important unsanctioned saint among native peoples in this area during this epidemic after he appeared to an Indian man dying from the disease. As the story of San Pascual Bailón’s apparition began to circulate among the Indian towns of the valley, he became an important object of local religious worship because residents considered him protector (abogado) of Indians against epidemic disease.67 Colonial sources describe cumatz as a physically gruesome illness, one that brought the afflicted “unspeakable pain,” spasms that caused the body to “turn and writhe incessantly” and ended in a “bloody flux” as the body bled out from its orifices.68 Vázquez, writing of an earlier 1558 cumatz epidemic, described similar symptoms for the disease “that was signaled by nosebleeds . . . that had no remedy.”69 The word “cumatz” also translated into “snake” in Kaqchikel, perhaps a nod to the writhing symptoms it produced.70 Fuentes y Guzmán asserted that “this illness [cumatz] is innate (connatural) to the Indians, incurable for all those afflicted by this contagion” and “impossible to cure.”71 He continued: “The only medicine that works is to place them on a sleeping mat on the floor close to the fire. And there [they are] at the mercy of Holy Providence until they recover or die.”72 Those living in communities affected by this epidemic did not, however, simply wait to see whether their family members, friends, and neighbors recovered or died. Yet the documentary record only hints at Maya medical strategies used to cure this illness or ease its symptoms. Residents of the Kaqchikel Maya town of San Antonio Aguascalientes found cumatz “terrifying.”73 This did not keep the sick from entering the town’s well-known hot springs after “having lost their senses” and finding themselves “close to death” from the illness: “Desiring a remedio, they went to the sulfuric hot springs that they have in that town, and the temperature was extremely hot, and they bathed [there] for long lengths of time.” 74 Note here that

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Fuentes y Guzmán uses the word “remedio” (remedy) in the sense of keeping the afflicted comfortable, alleviating symptoms temporarily, but that the use of hot springs did not produce a cure. Instead, the bathing practice appears to have acted as a palliative measure to comfort the sick as they neared death from the disease. Spaniards had remarked about the medical qualities of San Antonio Aguascalientes’s popular hot springs at least as early as 1586, when Franciscan friar Alonso Ponce reported that he saw both Spaniards and Indians bathing there.75 San Pascual Bailón’s apparition (visión) appeared to an unnamed indigenous man from the town of San Antonio Aguascalientes as he prepared to receive the viaticum during the final stages of cumatz, as being “covered in a glowing radiance” and dressed in “the most splendid clothing of unimaginable material.”76 In Mesoamerican and Christian cultures, deathbed illnesses could induce special states of being that invited communication with supernatural entities or deceased ancestors. Christian apparition events, such as the appearance of San Pascual here, could occur at dramatic moments of a particularly gruesome or incurable illnesses or injury, or when the faithful hovered on the brink between life and death.77 It is significant that it was an Indian who saw the apparition, tying into the detail provided by Fuentes y Guzmán that cumatz was considered by some to be incurable in Indians.78 The two conversed in Kaqchikel Maya.79 San Pascual asked the man why “the Indians” did not celebrate him with a holy day and fiesta. The man answered that he had “never heard of this saint before,” and he felt sure that no other Indians had heard of him before either. The apparition then claimed that “he could intercede to free [the Indians] from the contagions that afflicted them, and free them from death,” then asked the man to “spread the word to the rest of the Indians that he would be a trustworthy intercessor when they became ill.”80 In this case, this being identified itself as an intercessor specifically for Indians in cases of illnesses and epidemic disease. The sick man agreed, but warned that others of his “nation” (nación) would call him crazy.81 San Pascual then prognosticated that the man would die from cumatz in nine days, providing a specific time frame as a way to provide evidence of his authenticity and power. To further underscore his status as protector of Indians, San Pascual also declared “from this day forth, the pestilence will end and no other Indian will die.”82 Successful illness divination in colonial Mesoamerican cultures acted as both a practice and sign of ritual power that specialists had the requisite skill to access physical and supernatural evidence about illness and death. The sick man then began to spread word of San Pascual Bailón and his role as

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protector of Indians from epidemics. He called to his deathbed fellow members of his cofradía, the parish priest, and other elite Indians and related what had occurred. The parish priest, apparently satisfied with the Indian man’s explanation, then said mass in the saint’s honor, lending his tacit support for the devotions to San Pascual.83 Fuentes y Guzmán recorded that the cumatz epidemic ended that day as promised, and nine days later the Indian man died, “confirming and certifying the truth and that the apparition had been neither a dream nor delirium.”84 Vázquez also considered that the end of the epidemic, and the death of the Indian man as predicted, provided persuasive evidence that San Pascual Bailón had been a true apparition and not simply a result of a “whim” or the sick man’s “frailty” or “delirium.”85 The power to predict when death will occur and when an epidemic will cease acted as an impor tant sign of ritual power not only for humans (as healers and ritual specialists) but also for supernatural beings, such as San Pascual, who are portrayed as using this power to provide evidence of their legitimacy to the faithful. Successful divination helped convince not only Indian communities, but the Spanish as well, as both chroniclers commented on the persuasiveness of these details in the apparition account. San Pascual Bailón’s appearance during the cumatz epidemic, found in colonially produced sources such as these chronicles, speaks (as did the miraculous healing account) to the possibility that exceptionally pious or chosen Indians might survive epidemic disease (at least for a while longer) and have their story act as an example to others. What is different, however, is that this was a popular, unsanctioned saint that local religious authorities would later unsuccessfully try to eradicate. In fact, in the years following the epidemic, the fervor with which the Indian communities worshipped San Pascual Bailón, as evidenced by material objects located in their home altars and in public ceremonies, eventually made Spanish political and religious officials uneasy. During the second half of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth centuries, images of San Pascual circulated in the indigenous valley pueblos. Mayas there celebrated and revered him, depicting him as a death figure, fleshless and skeletal.86 Fuentes y Guzmán explained that San Pascual “in their [the Indians’] opinion, was death (who they say is a helpful being).” Furthermore, Indian home altars frequently contained his image: “Every Indian home had two or three big and small images [of San Pascual Bailón] in their homes, surrounded by flowers and incense.”87 Over time, San Pascual Bailón became integrated with the Santo Entierro de Cristo Nuestro procession that took place during the Easter

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celebrations. The procession left the Santo Domingo church annually on Good Friday, and the faithful transported San Pascual’s image, described as “the skeleton of death” or “the figure of death,” in a cart at the front. Worshippers lavishly dressed the skeletal statue and surrounded it with flower bouquets and garlands. Fuentes y Guzmán described himself as troubled by the idea of a death figure as supportive being, instead seeing “corruption,” “ignorance,” and “confusion” in the Indians’ interpretation. In fact, devotion to the saint became so widespread and caused “so much public disorder” that the Inquisition issued an edict ordering church officials to remove all images of San Pascual from their parish buildings and publicly burn them in bonfires in the central plazas.88 Indians reportedly did not turn out for the bonfires, and reverence for the saint continued: “And everywhere that [the Indians] saw his image, they kneeled and prayed to it.”89 Both of these religious events with Indian protagonists that took place during epidemic disease outbreaks—the miraculous healing and the apparition—are exceptional. That is, in fact, why they were recorded. Further, each portrays an exceptional Indian embedded in colonial religious idioms, which reflected overlapping Mesoamerican and colonial conceptions of ritual power in the face of epidemic disease and death. In contrast, detailed information about the many unexceptional deaths of individual children and adults from epidemics were often left unrecorded. An important exception are a series of child wakes held by grieving family members recorded by Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz during his 1769–70 pastoral visita through Central America’s parishes.90 He wrote his Descripción geográfico-moral based on his personal experiences during this time and on the answers that 113 parish priests gave to a questionnaire asking them to evaluate the state of their parishes. Cortés y Larraz considered the celebration of wakes in homes “disorderly” and a widespread problem, criticizing the practice of “staying up all night in the presence of the dead and images of the saints.”91 He noted that wakes “by necessity” were a frequent occurrence in Audiencia communities, alluding to the ways that illnesses, epidemics, accidents, and other kinds of expected and unexpected deaths permeated colonial life.92 Details of family-celebrated wakes and the accompanying rituals for the newly dead also provide a window into broad commonalities found in the eighteenth century, in particular those that marked infant and child death. Wakes functioned in colonial society as social gatherings where family members and neighbors came together in the homes of the dead or relatives to mark a loved one’s passing and also to celebrate the life of those who remained.

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They were held to mark the death of loved ones across colonial Central America, in the multiethnic neighborhoods of the capital of Santiago de Guatemala, and in regional towns such as Caluco, a salt-making village located near Sosonate in the western part of the Audiencia, whose residents primarily spoke Nahuatl and Spanish. Maya families also celebrated wakes in highland pueblos such as the K’iche’ towns of Zunil and Cantel near Quetzaltenango, and in the Mam towns of Todos Santos Cuchumatán and Chalchitán, pueblos located in the Cuchumatán mountains.93 Rich and poor families held wakes for both infants and adults soon after the death.94 A typical wake began during the day and lasted through the night until dawn, and sometimes even continuing as long as four days and nights.95 Relatives held the wakes in their homes where they carefully laid out the dead body. Family members, neighbors, and community members, men and women, old and young, from different racial and ethnic groups, came together to attend a wake.96 Mourners surrounded the body with “sumptuous shrines” that included flowers, images of the saints, and lit candles.97 Those attending said prayers and made supplications before the saints’ images that surrounded the corpse.98 Local and itinerant musicians offered their services to grieving families, playing music on guitars, violins, and the wooden marimba that resembles a xylophone.99 As the evening progressed, mourners sometimes moved back and forth from inside the home outside to the yard or patio, where they danced the zaramba, popular at that time in colonial Central America.100 As the musicians played, adults and children danced, ate food, and drank hot chocolate or chicha, a Mesoamerican alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn.101 Wakes for infants and young children (párvulos and criaturas) were particularly lively, and their celebration also continued through the night. This, in turn, brought them to the attention of parish priests and their supporters in the community. Archbishop Cortés y Larraz targeted infant wakes “because these gatherings occur at night with music and dancing, and are occasions for drunkenness and other grave disorders.”102 Though Cortés y Larraz claimed to have reduced the frequency of all-night infant wakes, parish priests continued to complain about the more boisterous wakes in different Audiencia parishes.103 Parishioners also continued to celebrate wakes “in the presence of the body of the dead infant,” despite a ban on this practice and the threat of excommunication if caught.104 In the town of Santiago de Apastaque, residents held infant wakes in eight different homes close to, or on, the same night in October 1769.105 A sarampión (measles) epidemic attacked the Audiencia that year and perhaps caused this cluster of infant deaths, including two in one family.106 Jacinto

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Valencia, a tributary Indian resident in the town, held a wake for his two dead infant sons on the same night. The musicians included Maestro Cornelio, an Indian who played harp, Estebán Hernández on marimba, and Antonio Ulloa on guitar. Valencia’s family members attended the wake, as did his neighbors, including José Gregorio Flores, a twenty-two-year- old free mulato.107 Close relatives, usually the parents or grandparents, hosted the wakes for deceased infants and children in their homes. Of the eight infant wakes that took place in Santiago de Apastaque during October 1769, two grandmothers held wakes for their infant grandchildren and five fathers and one mother held wakes for their deceased children. Juana Francisca, a fiftyyear-old free mulata, held a wake for her infant grandson in her home. Also present were the baby’s parents, her daughter Juana Marta and son-in-law Francisco López. The visitors, probably neighbors and extended family, included Pedro Ramírez, Siriaco Herrera and his two sons, Andrés Alférez and his two brothers, and José Gregorio Flores, María Montepeqe, and Gregoria Montepeque. The musicians included Eusebio Panameño, who played guitar. Noise from the wake attracted the attention of Victoriano Vega, a thirty-five year- old Indian and the town’s fiscal menor, who was responsible for ensuring community compliance with proper Catholic behavior. Around 8 p.m., Vega went to Juana Francisca’s house and asked them to stop the music. The mourners refused, and the wake and the music continued until dawn.108 Word of infant deaths must have traveled quickly through local communities for the musicians to get word and offer their ser vices to the bereaved families. For the Santiago de Apastaque child wakes, one musician hailed from the city of León. Among the other musicians, some were known and named by the bereaved, such as Barolo Villalobo, a twenty-eight-yearold free mulato and town resident who played guitar at the wake held at the home of Juana Riche, a free mulata, “in the presence of her dead infant daughter.”109 Tributary Indians Bartolo Carpio and Martín López played guitar and caramba, respectively, at the wake that Leonicio Rodríguez held for his infant daughter. Other musicians were either unknown to the bereaved families, as was the case for Estebán Tamayo, a thirty-sixyear- old tributary Indian who hired two Indian men he did not know to play the marimba and other instruments at his infant son’s wake. These same men played music at the wake that his neighbor José Carmona recently held for his young daughter.110 Forty-year- old Josefa Humaña managed to hold a wake for her deceased infant grandson even though she herself was sick and confined to bed,

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underlining a wake’s critical importance to bereaved families, even under difficult circumstances. Humaña hired two men to play caramba and guitar in her yard.111 The use of candles also played an important role in household wakes; families surrounded the deceased and saints images with lit candles. Candle sellers such as Matías Pérez Yboy, an Indian principal from the pueblo of San Juan Comalapa in the Valley of Guatemala, sold candles from his home and door-to- door to bereaved families. He apparently also sold candles to “Indians who took them to the mountains to burn,” activities that may have been associated with Mesoamerican death rituals.112 After a wake ended, families carried the body from the home to the church for burial. Some native peoples threw a flower called flor de muerto (flower of death) on graves and filled churches with them for funeral services.113 Sources also commented on the importance of the ritual purification of dead bodies and graves in Mesoamerican burial practices. Parish priests from San Cristobal Totonicapán, San Andrés Secul, and Olintepeque complained “of the excess of sahumerios that they use in the entry door to the church, altars, graves and woods; this is an example of idolatrous abuse.”114 Copal was used in a wide range of contexts in Mesoamerica to mark religious-ritual acts and also for everyday uses.115 The smell of copal would have been familiar in ritual and purification acts in colonial Central America, including those associated with epidemic death. The burning of unfamiliar materials after death however, as Archbishop Cortés y Larraz noticed, could cause anxiety and fear of infection in indigenous communities. One night in the town of Patzum, a family had called the town’s parish priest to their home to administer the ritual of extreme unction to a dying man. After the rite, the priest then burned some cotton in the sick man’s house, “and because the Indians never did this, they thought that he did this to infect them with the smoke. The pueblo became so upset that they took up arms to kill him; but God allowed him to escape when two Indian men began to argue, and then the women took [the priest] into their care and returned him to his home.”116

“A Constellation of Measles,” 1769 Archbishop Cortés y Larraz’s visita and the child wakes described above coincided with an outbreak of what he called “a constellation of measles.” He blamed the outbreak on the “poverty, drunkenness, and bad living” of those the disease afflicted, behavior that he believed fueled its rapid spread

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throughout the archbishopric.117 During the 1760s, the Audiencia of Guatemala responded to the outbreak by organizing an antiepidemic program, anchored by physicians for what seems to be for the first time, in the form of a medical junta made up of two to three licensed doctors. The junta developed a receta (a word that literally means a prescription or recipe) to slow or halt the epidemic’s spread and referred to the recommended medical treatment for measles according to late-eighteenth-century medical understandings of how to care for those sick with that disease. This treatment could be adjusted according “to the signs (indicios) that appeared on the afflicted.”118 A flexible cure in this instance was especially important given that the epidemic proved especially tricky because measles and smallpox struck at the same time. One of the problems colonial officials faced in attempting to tackle epidemics in rural areas, however, was the lack of licensed medical physicians available to evaluate the sick and the lack of drugstores and access to medicines that were necessary for the junta-recommended smallpox treatment cure. The Audiencia found a partial solution by enlisting the assistance of Archbishop Cortés y Larraz, who coordinated with priests living and working in rural pueblos “to contribute to their [the Indian’s] relief” during the outbreak.119 This is an early example of what would become more formalized after the introduction of smallpox inoculation starting in 1780—the link between political officials, religious personnel, medical physicians, and trusted Hispanicized local indigenous and mixed-race men and women whose collective work during epidemics and disease outbreaks anchored the labor pool of formal colonial antiepidemic campaigns. Cortés y Larraz himself used the language of compassion and humanitarian aid to call on priests in the archbishopric to “use all possible methods and diligences for the comfort and relief of the sick.”120 This help, however, also functioned as an act of colonial power, when officials mandated that the cost for that help would be borne by the afflicted communities themselves. As part of his call for the assistance of parish priests of Guatemala’s curates, Cortés y Larraz offered to pay for all of the foods and medicines needed in caring for the sick, which fits into traditional Christian and humanitarian ideas of the value of assistance to the sick and the poor.121 The Audiencia informed him, however, that this would not be necessary because there were enough funds available from the cajas de comunidad and cofradías from afflicted indigenous communities to pay for the antiepidemic measures. In essence, this policy “to aid the poverty stricken sick” actually further taxed tributary Indians.122 To make up for these new taxes, the Audiencia could suspend tribute labor taxes on

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Indian pueblos so that “they can stay in their homes caring for the sick, though they decided this on a case by case basis.”123 Additionally, Cortés y Larraz warned colonial officials that indigenous communities would likely put up stiff resistance to the mandated epidemics treatments: “The Indians who have been hit by the constellation [of measles] have their own medicines, and so they will not take just any medicine, except that of their temascales (ritual-medicinal steam bath) and the other [medicines] that they are accustomed to.”124 Here, Cortéz y Larraz shows a recognition that in public health efforts, colonial medicine and its recommended cures would surely come into conflict with “Indian medicine,” which had its own set of cures and therapies. He proved prescient in noting that Indians might resist taking medicines or using therapies not prescribed by their own doctors and that they would resist cures or therapies that were unfamiliar to them. While Cortés y Larraz’s writings did not describe Audiencia-sanctioned treatments used to tackle the measles-smallpox outbreak, they are recorded in Method Used for Curing Measles and Smallpox.125 This official handbook, published by order of the Audiencia of Guatemala, encompasses the treatments advocated by colonial medical doctors, touted as the most effective to date. The handbook’s publication represents a turning point in the integration of traditional humanitarian efforts with modernizing Enlightenment medicine and the development of formal, organized colonial public health campaigns. Colonial state-directed public health campaigns, constructed on the building blocks of long-established religious and colonial strategies for confronting epidemics already in place, provide evidence for how medical treatments and cures began to be seen by colonial authorities as more effective and successful at tackling epidemic disease. Additionally, its publication signaled that formal colonial medicine, faculty at the medical school at the University of San Carlos, and licensed medical doctors would become key players in state responses to epidemic disease and other public health risks. Finally, this state-sanctioned handbook shows the circulation of information, cures, and antiepidemic guidelines within New Spain during epidemic outbreaks as well as the often-used strategy of adapting and transforming recommended therapies based on local conditions in Guatemala, in particular its large majority indigenous population.126 In fact, the Protector de Indios, a royal official that dealt with policies toward native peoples, supported the manual’s publication to help fight smallpox and measles outbreaks there.127 Medical physicians Manuel Ávalos y Porras and Francisco Desplanquez, who lived and worked in Santiago de Guatemala, authored the guide.

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Ávalos y Porras had attended medical school at the University of San Carlos, trained by chair in medicine José de Medina, himself a University of San Carlos graduate.128 Little is known about the background or training of Desplanquez, who is listed as “approved doctor” (médico aprobado) in the pamphlet.129 The doctors based the recommended treatments on those circulating in Mexico and added their own recommendations adapted to the Audiencia’s specific needs. Both would be circulated across Central America, the Mexico-based sections in print form and the Guatemala-specific instruction in handwritten form to quickly disseminate it given the epidemic’s rapid spread.130 Audiencia officials circulated these instructions to colonial towns, to Indian political office holders in tributary communities, and to ecclesiastical officials, parish priests, and missionary clergy.131 The Audiencia used religious, colonial, and economic justifications and motivations to protect the Indians from epidemics. The language and strategies echo traditional colonial and religious humanitarian discourses: In this matter . . . Christian charity obliges us to care for these poor unhappy ones when they don’t understand [the illness], and for justice’s sake (justicia) the Ministers are entrusted [with] the protection of these minors, and of the prelates and parish priests who watch over them for their benefit as if they were sheep in the flock, the Fiscal judges [that this] must be done in the current situation as these sicknesses have struck again, and because of the ruin to these poor ones, and the injury that the loss of so many tributary vassals would cause to the Crown.132

Wrapped into this call to care for Indians was a paternalistic and colonial view of Indians, here represented by a common religious metaphor as “flocks of sheep” who must be protected from disease by colonial officials because it is a Christian duty, because they are vassals of the king (who has a duty to protect his subjects), and because they represented sources of colonial wealth that epidemics periodically threatened or depleted. Method Used for Curing Measles and Smallpox did not, however, offer a cure for either disease in the modern sense of the word. It is clear from the handbook that the eighteenth-century meaning of “cure” is different from our contemporary conceptions. Robert McCaa has noted in his work on smallpox during the sixteenth century that the verb “curar” at the time meant “simply to care for and nurse the sick,” and cure in this eighteenthcentury handbook encompasses this meaning.133 By the mid- eighteenth century, however, the idea of “cure” had begun to transform. The conception of “cure” began to refer not just to care but medical strategies that were

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seen to improve chances of recovery. Eventually it included medical innovations like inoculation that could prevent or cure specific epidemic diseases. The handbook authors use the word “curación” in the title which can mean “curing” or “healing.” The therapies offer palliatives to relieve pain and keep people as comfortable as possible. The doctors outline a healthful diet that in their experience improved the afflicted person’s ability to recover once they passed through the most dangerous stages. They also promote the use of some local and indigenous ingredients considered healthful and denigrate others as impeding recovery or promoting disease. The guidebook describes perceived racial and ethnic differences in how measles presented on the bodies of whites (los blancos) and Indians, blacks, and mixed-race groups. Measles, for everyone, began with a very high fever, and spots that looked like “flea bites” appeared on the body.134 For whites, raised red spots (manchas coloradas) accompanied the fever, and over the course of the illness the spots merged together to form larger spots, “so that sometimes they covered, without interruption, large sections on the body, especially on the face.” For Indians, mulatos, and blacks, measles appeared as granules (granitos) rather than spots “in the size and shape of the head of a pin, the same color as their skin.”135 In everyone, the measles ended when the spots flaked off like “white flour” or like “a bit of dust similar to small bran flakes.”136 The guide notes some gender differences as well: measles accelerated the menstrual cycle in women.137 Medical doctors also found medical anomalies for diseases interesting, and they reported on them in their correspondence and in colonial newspapers. In the early 1780s, for example, the Gazeta de México reported on a boy who contracted measles and smallpox at the same time, whereby the measles symptoms appeared on the right side of his body and the smallpox on the left.138 Because measles and smallpox struck the populace at the same time, it made the diseases hard to recognize and treat: “In this epidemic these [diseases] do not have the same [symptoms] they usually do.”139 Officials observed scattered cases of patients who had measles and smallpox at the same time and others who survived smallpox only to subsequently come down with “unhealthy fevers” and “measle-ish fevers” (calentura morbillosas o sarampionsas).140 The sick could exhibit vomiting, diarrhea, the expulsion of worms “above and below,” symptoms that did not usually accompany measles.141 If someone with measles also had a bloody nose or coughed up blood, the caretaker administered medicinal bloodletting called sangrias.142 When the patient suffered from measles and hysteria (histeria) simultaneously, the caretaker would incense the room with burned shoes, feathers, or wool, whose smell would calm the patient, and place the crushed

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herb rue on the navel.143 Cases of measles with worms were treated with a medicinal drink made from mercury the size of a garbanzo bean mixed well with rapadura and water.144 Vomiting symptoms that accompanied measles could be addressed by concocting a healing drink made from, among other things, ashes, water, lime juice, powders made from ground burnt deer antlers, or tierra de Esquipulas (earth taken from the renowned healing shrine in Guatemala).145 All Guatemala’s racial and ethnic groups, men and women, and adults and children are described in the handbook as susceptible to measles and smallpox. A central theme of this handbook, however, is the perception that Indians were especially susceptible to both epidemic diseases: “During this measles epidemic many Indians died because of lack of a cure, and because of their diet, that must be adjusted to protect them from [measles] and from smallpox, two illnesses that are destroying [Indian] communities. This guide is written [to address] the misery of these poor ones, and their backwardness.”146 The authors also note class differences in survival and blame the high mortality rates of the Indians and the poor in part on their diets: “We have observed that these three illnesses (smallpox, measles, and measleish fevers) are not as dangerous for the wealthy (los ricos) who have all the help, comforts, and care that they need, and if it is disastrous and deadly for the Indians and the poor, it is because of the carelessness or want of their diet.”147 As a result, much of the guide focuses various health and social efforts to enhance their chance of their survival from both epidemics. The dietary recommendations include what was considered healthful Indian food that was easily accessible: “The food [eaten] should be warm broth, or bread or rice atoles (corn based drinks), or of toasted rice or of cooked and ground corn, or tortillas toasted and then ground up. One can add a small bit of maidenhair fern and mint.”148 Here the prescribed diet shows a combination of New and Old World foods seen as healthful: rice and corn, with an emphasis on corn atoles and tortillas, both staples of Mesoamerican diets. As the fever diminished, doctors bled patients and encouraged them to drink lots of liquids, but eat little food, until the measles began to heal. Help came to indigenous communities, but at the cost of direct colonial medical interventions into Maya culture, living practices, diet, and even dress. Moreover, the guidelines identified and countered what doctors perceived as “Indian” responses to the epidemics, thought to interfere with the body’s humoral balance, especially bathing practices in rivers and hot springs and the use of the temascal. The authors also opposed the consumption of certain food and drink consumed by Indians as dangerous

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and promoting illness. For example, “hot” foods should be avoided. This included chile peppers, peppers from Chiapas, súchil (“flower,” from the Nahuatl xochitl), chocolate, “every kind” of aguardiente (alcohol), chicha, and “whatever other food that is spicy or hot by nature.”149 The handbook warns that Indians would not understand the cures, and so underscores the necessity of forming alliances with indigenous elites to police their community members and ensure that they followed the prescribed diet and therapies: “Indian Justices must ensure that all the Indians in their respective towns and jurisdictions punctually apply and carry out [these guidelines], and follow the recipe for the cure of measles and smallpox, and the diet that accompanies [it].”150 From the start, antiepidemic health care designed to treat indigenous peoples carried with it a coercive component. Indian political leaders and elites who did not follow the official treatment instructions would be punished with fifty lashes and suspension from their political office.151 Local and regional colonial officials (gobernadores, corregidores, and alcaldes mayores) were admonished to be sure to suspend forced labor and tribute of Maya communities during epidemics as well—“because it is not just”—or they would be fined 500 pesos.152 The same themes of advocating humanitarian help for Indians stricken by epidemic illness, interlocking connections between physical and spiritual health, and the importance of diet can also be seen in the day-to- day operations of the Royal Hospital and its pharmacy in Santiago de Guatemala.153 At this time, the hospital had ninety-plus beds, with separate areas for female, Indian, and mixed-race patients. While most of the beds went to patients, some of the servants who cared for the sick also slept at the hospital.154 A 1765 inspection of the hospital monitored the conditions of the hospital’s kitchen, bakery and food supply, and pharmacy. Officials who led the inspection were concerned with what they considered to be credible charges that indigenous patients in the Sala de Indios (Indian ward) were treated badly by the hospital staff and that “they [the Indians] were regarded with less compassion (menos lástima) because they did not know how to defend themselves. This is not the case in the Sala de Ladinos because they will complain.”155 The inspectors questioned hospital officials, including the medical doctor and surgeon in charge, over whether Indian patients received less food, and lower quality food, than the ladino patients. They heard reports of the nudity (desnudez) of indigenous patients and the poor quality of their bedding in comparison to the ladino patients. The report used language that attempted to elicit compassion for their plight by referring to them as “those miserable Indians” and “the unhappy ones.”156

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The Royal Hospital’s staff did face many challenges as they provided food and drink tailored to par ticular illnesses. Foods that hospitals stocked and cooked for their patients included beef, chicken, garbanzo beans, and rice, along with spices such as salt and achiote. Those with wounds and ulcerous sores had to have food without any spice (no picantes). The staff fed the elderly and those “without appetites” a chicken-based soup. Patients who had diarrhea and dysentery ate a diet heavy in rice and bread.157 Caretakers administered healthful beverages to patients that included chocolate, atol, or some other appropriate healthful drink “that conforms to the illness.”158 Druggists mixed herbal medicines from “recipe books,” called cuadernos de recetas and cuadernos de simples. The San Juan de Dios Hospital relied on these medical recipe books to dispense treatments to the sick from the multiethnic city and surrounding indigenous towns. Such books represented decades of medical knowledge passed down and transformed by the hospital’s druggists since the hospital’s establishment in the sixteenth century. The drugstore acquired local ingredients from Guatemala and additionally received more or less regular shipments of medicinal herbs and ingredients from Oaxaca.159 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, monasteries often had pharmacies as well, illustrating the strong connection between religion and health care around the idea that the distribution of medicines was a compassionate act, another way of providing alms to the multiethnic sick to care for their physical and spiritual health.160 Urban health care settings testify to the difficulty in caring for different ethnic groups. Indigenous patients proved a particular challenge because of the cultural and linguistic barriers that existed between them and the Spanish-speaking medical physicians and priests who treated them. During the 1760s, the priest responsible for ministering to the spiritual needs of the hospital’s patients did not speak lengua, meaning that he did not speak any of the Maya or other indigenous languages, and they had to send for a bilingual priest. In times of need, the priest could not confess his indigenous patients or administer last rites if he could not converse in an indigenous language, an aspect of health care that “is so necessary and important for their [the Indian’s] eternal health.”161 The language use here of “eternal health” in the hospital setting underscores how physical and spiritual health intertwined in colonial understandings of medical treatment. This connection, as we will see, continued long after the introduction of inoculation.

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Humanitarianism and Introduction of Inoculation in 1780 The introduction of smallpox inoculation to Guatemala’s capital city Nueva Guatemala in 1780 dramatically decreased mortality rates for those lucky enough to be inoculated in advance of the epidemic. This initial success, though limited, led colonial officials from the Audiencia, the capital’s city government, and the Protomedicato to argue that smallpox inoculation had the potential to “save” Guatemala’s population, and they advocated expanding its use. Elite supporters and participants in colonial Central America’s Enlightenment cultures felt that they had a responsibility to develop the new medical sciences and apply any such innovations to all of Guatemala’s multiethnic populations, including its majority indigenous population, to protect them from the ravages of smallpox. Even though Guatemalan elites represented smallpox inoculation as a new and modern medical practice, inoculation had existed for centuries in various parts of the world, including China and the Middle East. It was not, however, frequently used in Spain or Spanish America until the eighteenth century.162 Inoculation was practiced in Spain as early as 1728, and in the 1770s it came into widespread use as an antismallpox strategy.163 In colonial Mexico and Guatemala, inoculation was first used during the epidemics of 1779–80, which were part of a larger series of smallpox epidemics that ravaged much of the North American continent between 1775 and 1782.164 In Mexico in October 1779, Estebán Morel performed the first documented inoculation, but extensive inoculation did not begin there until the subsequent 1795–96 epidemic.165 Inoculation in Peru was introduced when medical physician Cosme Bueno published a treatise promoting its use in 1776. The first documented performance occurred in 1778, carried out by a friar, but it did not really catch on and became discredited at that time. A second, relatively more successful effort was made to reintroduce inoculation to Peru in the 1790s.166 In contrast, medical physician José Flores, who later became the first head of the Audiencia of Guatemala’s Royal Protomedicato and chair of medicine at the University of San Carlos, had much more success introducing inoculation during the 1780 epidemic. Flores, along with his medical cohort, and with the support of the president of the Audiencia, the archbishop, and Nueva Guatemala’s city government, quickly set up programs that reportedly inoculated “thousands” in and around the capital.167 The introduction of smallpox inoculation in Guatemala was not uncontested. Those in Guatemala and New Spain became familiar with the

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therapy because of recent publications on the topic, and through the circulation of inoculation-themed articles in the gazettes of Guatemala, Mexico, and Madrid, all of which were available in Nueva Guatemala, especially to colonial elites. The pro- and anti-inoculation debates played out in Guatemala’s newspaper, the Gazeta de Guatemala, and in city council and university politics. In June of 1780, Flores requested permission from the president of the Audiencia to use inoculation to fight smallpox. On July 26, the Audiencia approved the request, as long as inoculation was voluntarily accepted and not forced.168 Why did inoculation succeed Guatemala in 1780? It succeeded in part because José Flores did not wait for or rely on imperial policy mandates. Instead he read widely in the medical, scientific, and philosophical literatures of Europe and the New World to formulate his own ideas on the subject. Flores also innovated on his own and in collaboration with university colleagues and students. Indeed, these two features characterized Guatemala’s intellectual and university cultures as a whole and made it a relatively small yet vibrant, creative, and productive place to practice medicine and science in the second half of the eighteenth century. Moreover, inoculation succeeded because of the capital city’s relatively unique circumstances. In July and December of 1773, earthquakes struck the Audiencia capital city of Santiago de Guatemala and the surrounding region, causing enormous destruction, even more than usual, as the city experienced repeated earthquakes since its founding in 1541. Public health problems arose in the wake of the earthquake, including disease outbreaks and lack of clean water. In response, on May 7, 1774, president of the Audiencia Martín de Mayorga established the Junta de Salubridad, composed of the doctors Manuel Ávalos y Porras and Francisco Desplanquez, and an alcalde and an eclesiástico to address the health needs of the city’s residents.169 In effect, this official junta that they anchored represented what appears to be the first state-sponsored public health board in the Audiencia. At the same time, Guatemala’s city government commissioned Ávalos y Porras, who now was a member of the medical faculty at the University of San Carlos, to write a handbook for how to treat typhus.170 Because of the earthquake’s destruction, Audiencia officials ordered that Santiago de Guatemala be abandoned as the capital, and they moved east to a new capital city, Nueva Guatemala.171 The successful 1780 inoculation campaign was all the more remarkable for occurring in the middle of moving and building a new capital city. At the same time, the fact that this capital was in transition, with all the difficulties that this entailed, opened

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space for trying a new, somewhat controversial antismallpox response (for Guatemala): inoculation. In July 1780, Audiencia and city officials agreed that the epidemic “is likely to be very distressful and fatal,” more so than usual, because the transition to the new capital was still in process.172 No hospital had yet been constructed. The city government noted that “the doctors and pharmacists are dispersed and distant,” as many had not made the transition to Nueva Guatemala.173 The housing situation, especially for the city’s poorer social groups, was not yet well established, and they lacked “comfortable and covered houses,” which officials feared would worsen the effects of the epidemic on the city’s poor.174 Neighborhoods and the roads between them were still under construction, and because of the rainy season, “communication is arduous and difficult.”175 In a letter written to request Audiencia funds to deal with the epidemic, city officials noted the following: We are asking to receive the funds necessary to aid in the survival of families, and many live in poverty here even in a state of perfect health [e.g., nonepidemic times], and that the people have perished from losses suffered in the ruin of Santiago de Guatemala [the old capital city], [and because] of the costs of moving [to the new capital], the shortage and high price of food, and even the high cost of clothing.176

Officials used the language of social suffering of the city’s population to appeal for funding. On August 23, 1780, the city government updated news of its antismallpox efforts, describing the successful introduction of inoculation and other antismallpox strategies.177 By that point, city officials, in conjunction with medical physicians such as José Flores, had divided the city into sections. Three to four elite men, usually representing a combination of medical, political, and religious social groups, directed antismallpox efforts in each sector to help counter the epidemic’s spread. They also distributed food, clothing, and bedding to the sick and their families. In rural Maya towns surrounding the capital, medical physicians, often in conjunction with local priests and Indian elites, were put in charge of similar programs. Surgeon Toribio de Carbajal worked among Maya residents of the town of Petapa during the 1780 smallpox epidemic. He reported using inoculation successfully there, though it is unclear how many persons he inoculated.178 Colonial officials working to address the epidemic utilized the language of compassion and moral responsibility toward their fellow inhabitants of the new capital and surrounding towns. They noticed that what the afflicted

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“have in common is that they are almost all poor [or] extremely poor, lacking in housing, clothing, and food.”179 Interestingly, however, cabildo officials did not necessarily see the poor as vectors of contagion, or as responsible for the epidemic’s spread. Instead, they saw them as deserving of aid: “Until now these people [those afflicted with smallpox] have been cared for by the city government and its commissioners with food, bedding, doctors, medicines, and money, not according to their needs but as much as possible. It is very grave for them, and we can only give them compassion and tenderness, but we cannot help them all.”180 By September 1780, officials spent roughly 8,000 pesos to help their fellow community members address the epidemic’s effects and the material needs of those in the capital. Officials collected 5,000 pesos as alms from the city’s prominent citizens, and comisionados (constables), the appointed men who led the antismallpox campaign, donated 3,000 pesos.181 As the outbreak continued, public health workers began to carefully compile statistics to describe the epidemic’s widespread and devastating effects, dividing the population into categories of sick, recovering, dead, and successfully inoculated. At the end of August the city government reported 8,667 sick with smallpox. Of those sick, they considered roughly 3,000 in “extreme need of daily food.” They judged another 3,000 had some access to food but were still in need significant financial support. The remaining 2,600 had the ability and the resources to treat their sick family members and feed and clothe their families adequately.182 This type of explicit numerical data worked to further legitimate their arguments for the severity of the epidemic, the need for increased funding, and the significant effects on the urban poor. José Goicoechea, Martín Serra, and Ignacio de Coronado controlled one of the city’s cuarteles. They kept officials apprised of their progress by compiling the necessary statistical information for their sector of the city. The men distributed more than 70 blankets and sheets and provided a daily rations of atol, milk, and candles to those in need. A census counted 300 persons in their sector sick with smallpox; 20 of those had been inoculated and so suffered from a less virulent form of the illness. The remaining 280 were infected with “natural smallpox,” smallpox that was not the result of inoculation. In the absence of a formal city hospital during the transition of the capital, officials created makeshift hospitals in each of the various sectors. In this sector, 12 beds were set up in the San Francisco parish church, still under construction.183 Flores also reported concrete data to measure the success of the inoculations. By August 22, he inoculated two hundred persons “of every kind”

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in Nueva Guatemala, mostly under the age of twenty, the age group not yet exposed to smallpox because the previous epidemic had struck the capital back in the 1760s. Only one of the inoculated persons died, a thirteenyear- old girl who seemed to survive the inoculation only to later succumb to a fever.184 Flores continued inoculations through the rest of August and September and into October.185 With the 1780 epidemic and inoculation efforts, statistics became a key part of discourses on health and moral responsibility during epidemics in colonial Central America. At the height of the epidemic, August 1780, the capital’s SánchezCubillas Press published a Spanish translation of a French Royal Academy of Science smallpox inoculation manual.186 Most likely, Flores played a key role in ensuring its publication and timing. He also added a section to the inoculation manual titled “Local method of inoculation first developed by José Flores.” Not content to simply use the “French” method, Flores created his own where he explicitly adapted inoculation to conditions in Guatemala. In his “local method,” Flores recommended tailoring the procedure to ease the introduction of inoculation to the large, mainly rural, Maya population. He warned that above all, no violence should be used: “The principal requisite for a successful [inoculation] procedure is that the military officer, the Spanish, and the [Indian] elites of the [Indian] towns follow these instructions and [inoculate] carefully and gently, and take extreme care not to use violence and not to terrify the Indians.”187 To this end, Flores argued that lanzetas (lancets), medical instruments used to cut open smallpox pustules in the inoculation process, scared indigenous children and their parents. He instead advocated using poultices made using cantárides— metallic, emerald-green beetles also known as cantharides and Spanish fly. The beetle contains the chemical cantharidin, which irritates skin tissues in humans and animals, and the poultice made from this insect material proved effective at raising blisters. To inoculate using the local method, Flores first mixed two poultices made from the crushed beetle and unspecified “other things” and placed the material the size of a real coin on the upper arms of the person being inoculated. After the poultice caused blisters on each arm, Flores then cut the blisters with scissors.188 He placed a bit of cotton string or fabric “wellsoaked” in the pus of a mature smallpox vesicle taken from someone with a less virulent form of smallpox on the open wound of each blister, where he left it for forty to forty-eight hours. He then removed the pus-soaked material and replaced it with a diapalma desiccant, apparently made from palm oil, lead oxide, and other ingredients, taking care to clean the sores and replace the desiccant each day. After six days or so, the inoculated person

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came down with a mild form of smallpox, as with the European method. Flores reported that he first practiced his local method on the president of the Audiencia’s unnamed female servant.189 As part of his local method, Flores began to develop separate inoculation guidelines for menstruating and pregnant women, infants, and those simultaneously afflicted by other diseases. He cautioned against inoculating children under two years of age “as it will give convulsions and other things that [smallpox] has caused in those [children] of that age who have been [naturally] exposed.”190 Flores also warned of the dangers of inoculating pregnant women as well as young women of thirteen to fourteen years of age who had not yet menstruated. Strangely, he considered menstruation an effective protection from smallpox, counseling that “women can be inoculated as soon as their menstruation finishes because they do not catch smallpox during that time.”191 Official correspondence asking for medical assistance and funding for the sick depict the sincere desire of Guatemala’s elites and the city government to aid their fellow community members with these focused antiepidemic measures, using humanitarian language that showed compassion rather than blame: “This plan [to aid those afflicted with smallpox], presented in light of this most lamentable spectacle, forms a distressing painting of this epidemic, [and] the poverty and misery that deeply penetrates the compassion and pain of this Royal Committee (Real Junta).”192 Smallpox inoculation, used in conjunction with other antismallpox efforts during the 1780 epidemic, proved largely successful in tempering the mortality rates and in helping the afflicted and their families with material assistance and medicines within a limited geographic scope. Much of the rest of colonial Central America, however, did not have the benefit of inoculation during this epidemic and continued to cope as before. Fray Juan Ramón Solis wrote of the difficult and time-consuming work that he performed ministering to dying and sick Ixil Maya in Nebaj because so many died so quickly: The work that I have had to do has been enormous, and there is no sick person that I have not visited, administering the sacraments to most [of the dying], and praying evangelios over the [dying] children. I have ordered them [the Indians] not to move those who died, and leave them in their sleeping rooms where they died . . . and often I have to confess them on the floor, sometimes 5 or more at the same time.193

Solis wrote to the alcalde mayor (colonial administrator) of Huehuetenango and Totonicapán complaining the Indian doctors in the Nebaj treated

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smallpox with temascales despite of repeated warnings “from the pulpit” not to place the sick there because he and other colonial officials held that this Mesoamerican ritual-medicinal therapy promoted the spread of the disease. The practice continued, however, even though the Indian alcaldes (local government officials) walked through the town’s streets, publicly warning against temascal use.194 Attitudes toward epidemic disease and the role of medicine in caring for the sick, promoting recovery, and its prevention began to transform significantly among elites during the eighteenth century, even more so with the successful introduction of smallpox inoculation in 1780. Participants in Central America’s Enlightenment saw what they considered was the great potential of medicine to “save” broad sectors of the population, including the majority indigenous population, not only from smallpox but also from measles, typhus, and other diseases. Centralized efforts that provided medical assistance and material help to afflicted families and communities also functioned as a performance of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of Indians and the poor for their own good and for the broader public good. Additionally, the introduction of inoculation for humanitarian reasons signaled that formal colonial medicine, faculty members at the medical school at the University of San Carlos, and licensed medical doctors would become key players in colonial society through state- directed responses to epidemic disease and other public health risks. The circulation of information, cures, and antiepidemic guidelines within New Spain during outbreaks additionally reveals that to succeed, colonial medicine needed to adapt and transform recommended therapies based on local conditions in Guatemala and in particular to the medical cultures of its large majority indigenous population.

chapter two

Typhus and the Landscapes of Maya Medicine

Even though typhus epidemics were more or less regular occurrences in the lives of the peoples of colonial Central America, many remained awestruck by their devastation.1 When typhus broke out in multiple highland Maya towns near what is now the Guatemala-Mexico border at the turn of the nineteenth century, the priest Juan José Juárez described the spreading epidemic in apocalyptic terms: “All of this is a labyrinth, a terror, and [a] confusion, and it seems that an exterminating angel of death is fleeing the curate.”2 The typhus epidemic that Fray Juárez described as a kind of angel of death attacked Santa Eulalia, San Juan Ixcoy, and San Miguel Acatán during the winter of 1804–5 at the tail end of a decadelong series of outbreaks that struck numerous towns in the Guatemalan highlands. Typhus is a disease of cold climates like those found in these mountain pueblos, and it tends to break out in the winter and then fade in the spring and summer as temperatures warm. It is also a disease of towns, where the poor live in crowded conditions.3 As yet, there are no firm conclusions about whether epidemic typhus, transmitted to humans via lice, came to the Americas with the arrival of Europeans or existed there before colonization.4 The first definitive modern accounts of the disease come from the final battles of the Reconquista Wars from 1489 to 1490 in Granada that led to the collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s last Muslim kingdom. Historian David Cook notes that many men who participated in Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas were veterans of the conquest of Granada. He hypothesizes that some of these men had likely survived the disease, which can re-emerge years later, and so 62

Map 2. Soloma and Jacaltenango Parishes, Eighteenth Century.

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one or more of them may have carried it to the Caribbean. Those who survive typhus have what is called “long immunity” to the disease, meaning that it can reemerge in a recovered patient years later, especially when the immune system becomes stressed.5 In colonial Latin America, typhus typically had a mortality rate of between 5 and 25 percent, with higher rates among the elderly and lower rates in children.6 During these particular outbreaks, mortality rates tended toward the higher end of this scale, and even exceeded them in some villages during that winter. Juárez reported that thirty of the one hundred tributary Indians listed in San Miguel Acatán’s most recent census had already died from the disease.7 The town of Santa Eulalia experienced a 41 percent typhus death rate, while an astonishing 65 percent of the residents of Concepción perished.8 The high rates are but one type of measurement of the virulence of this outbreak. Postepidemic censuses and reports describe entire families dying together in the same home.9 To make matters worse, recovering typhus patients and their surviving family members also faced famine. Many residents had had no spare time during the outbreak to plant corn and other needed foodstuffs. Those who did saw their crops and those of neighboring towns consumed by a locust plague that traveled across the region.10 In addition to the high mortality rates, medical authorities, priests, alcaldes mayores, and others who lived through them had a hard time definitively categorizing the illness outbreak.11 Officials who coordinated the medical campaigns at the Audiencia level characterized the outbreak as tabardillo, known today as typhus (tifus). Those who treated the sick in the field, however, alternately described what they saw as furious fevers, epidemic fevers, malignant fevers, synochus, fevers mixed with inflammation, contagious fevers, pestilential fevers, and fiebres petequales.12 All fell under the colonial- era disease category tabardillo, yet according to colonial medical authorities variations of the disease existed and to some extent required different treatments. Today we know that epidemic typhus is transmitted by body lice that live and lay eggs in clothing, especially in the seams. After hatching, louse nymphs feed on human blood, molting three times over the course of two weeks to reach adulthood. The lice excrete “typhus organisms” that carry the disease to the skin, which enters human bodies when the afflicted scratch the insect’s itchy feeding sites. The disease typically emerges within five to fifteen days after infection, causing headache, fever, and chills followed by a distinctive rash.13 Whether or not epidemic typhus predated European colonization of the Americas, Mesoamerican and colonial medicine had at the very least three

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hundred years of experience with the disease. Botanical knowledge for treating typhus with plants and herbs readily available in the Guatemalan highlands circulated in local medical cultures. Colonial peoples, including the highland Maya, for the most part cared for typhus patients in their own homes. Because of this long-term experience with the disease and its primary treatment in the home, there were plenty of opportunities for cross-cultural knowledge exchanges about what caused typhus, how the disease spread, and how best to treat the afflicted and provide them the best chance for survival. Families continued to prefer to treat the typhus sick in their homes even after formal colonial medical campaigns began to actively treat the disease in the highlands during the 1790s. This would become a serious point of contention as the epidemic wore on because colonial medicine increasingly came into conflict with Mesoamerican treatments. In the process, Mesoamerican medical cultures became increasingly visible to colonial officials and medical campaign workers, who remained in stricken communities for weeks and sometimes months at a time. As medical workers treated the sick amid the disorder that the epidemic generated, they became aware of an array of sacred spaces used in healing individuals and communities, including temascales, along with what colonial officials labeled “adoratorios,” so- called Maya pagan temples that formed a key aspect of Mesoamerica medical-ritual responses to disease.

Treating Typhus in Colonial Central America When typhus struck a community, towns and homes came to have a distinctive rotting smell that signaled infection, as the priest Gage noticed during a seventeenth-century outbreak: “The filthy smell and stench which came from those who lay sick of this disease was enough to infect the rest of the house, and all that came to see them. It rotted their very mouths and tongues, and made them as black as coal before they died.”14 Eyewitnesses to these epidemics during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued to remark on the same specific noxious smell, one that provided a sensory aspect to the typhus outbreak that seemed impossible to escape. Doctors who treated patients noted their “cadaver-like breath.”15 One epidemic inspector found that “houses where entire families have died left a smell that, upon opening the door in order to check what was inside, restrains all desire to continue the search.”16 Further reconnaissance in the countryside revealed “entire families [who] died [of typhus] together closed up in their ranchos, that when entered, emanated a [characteristic] stench

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or fetidness.”17 Those living through the outbreaks worried that the putrid smells acted as contagion that further spread the disease: “To this one must add that since the bad state to which the Indians were reduced [during the epidemic] did not permit them to excavate deep graves, the air was filled with the smell of corruption, which thus further spread the disease.”18 Hastily buried bodies of the typhus dead in shallow graves added to contagion fears that the intense smell attracted animals. This happened in Concepción, where the severity of the epidemic quickly led to more than two hundred fresh graves dug in the patio of the parish church and in the central plaza at the site of the shrine of San Sebastián.19 The “fetidness” attracted “animals [who] discovered them and dug them up,” including, reportedly, a jaguar.20 It is likely that these included both wild and domestic animals—not just the jaguar, but also sheep, cattle, and other animals whose owners had died or could no longer care for them, who then roamed through epidemic towns foraging for food or perished from lack of care.21 High mortality rates and the death of entire families during typhus outbreaks also meant death for their domestic animals when no one remained to feed and care for them, further stressing local economies and food sources. When one resident who had fled the outbreak with his family returned home after it ended, he described finding “that the majority of Indians of Santa Eulalia have perished and are lying unburied all over the place, their decaying corpses eaten by the animals which stalk the countryside. Because of this, and the fact that countless sheep also perished neglected in their pens, the pestilence raged even more.”22 Galenic medical ideas, which characterized the human body as controlled by humors, held that aromas of decay generated from the animals or humans corpses caused illness. These ideas continued to play an important role in colonial-era medical explanations for the spread of disease, existing alongside new theories of the spread of disease that characterized the era. This led some caretakers of typhus victims to utilize scent barriers to protect themselves, such as a vinegar-dipped handkerchief, a practice that was used into the early nineteenth century.23 The connection between illness and humoral conceptions of “bad air,” known in Guatemala as mal aire, intersected with Mesoamerican medical cultures that also considered certain kinds of noxious smells as diseasecausing.24 Maya codices and the Popul Vuh characterize the underworld of Xibalba as stinking and disease-filled.25 Horrible smells emanated from the Lords of Xibalba that signified their power to cause illness, such as Ahal Puh (Pus Maker), who caused infection. Glyphs representing these gods on Classic and Postclassic Era Maya pottery or carved into stone included foliated scrolls indicating the pestilential odors they exuded.26

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Clues from burial accounts show that the highland Maya during the colonial period shared a concern with colonial medicine that the smells generated by the epidemic dead might infect living humans. Descriptions of mourners burning copal incense at the graves of the recently dead in both epidemic and nonepidemic times use the verb sahumar to describe this activity—to use aromatic incense for ritual purification. Sources refer to sahumerios and copales interchangeably because the incense burned was almost always copal.27 While priests and colonial officials frequently associated the use of copal with superstition and idolatry, the underlying idea of the practice had to do with purification, perhaps including medical purification as well, given religious and medical entanglements in Mesoamerican cultures.28 Of course, Christian priests and their assistants also burned ritual incense in certain contexts, such as at church services, wakes, funerals, and religious processions including those designed to halt epidemics. State- directed antityphus campaigns show a particular concern with Indian homes as a locus for the disease’s spread. In highland Maya communities, sick and healthy family members intermingled, and neighbors and extended family visited and likely helped with their care. We can infer this because the official cure books circulated by the Protomedicato and used by medical campaigns cautioned that households should have no more than one to two caretakers and house no more than two to three typhus patients at one time. The cure books also cautioned caretakers not to allow the healthy to visit the houses of the sick.29 People like Fray Juárez complained that Indians who treated typhus-afflicted family members in their home only caused more deaths: “It seems to me that leaving the sick in their houses under their care of their kin [worsens the illness], and even though they treat them, they do not give them the correct medical assistance.”30 Campaign medical officials also considered the home a potential vector for infection even after the patient expired or recovered. They conducted house-to-house inspections to remove and burn any petates, the woven sleeping mats used in indigenous homes, to lessen the likelihood that the bedding would spread illness further. Colonial authorities, with the help of Indian alcaldes, attempted to remove surviving family members from their homes as well. Then they disinfected buildings where the sick may have been by barricading each tightly and burning sulfur inside. Families could not return to live in the home for fifteen to twenty days after disinfection.31 This of course meant that survivors would have to seek out shelter somewhere else, adding to the instability that epidemics caused and potentially further spreading the disease. Local and regional plant-based treatments for typhus circulated across colonial, Mesoamerican, and local medical cultures as common knowledge

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in curaciones (cures), remedios (remedies), and recetas (recipes). A number of plants thought to have curative or palliative properties for typhus patients also affected various aspects of female reproduction, underscoring not only the gendered nature of the illness within colonial understandings of this disease, but also in its prescribed treatments. Historian and naturalist Francisco Ximénez identified cocolmeca bark as a cure for typhus and the associated fevers tercianarios and cuaternarios.32 Ximénez had himself experimented with this tree bark and confirmed its beneficial use, calling it “a marvelous thing,” one of the most important “god-given plants.”33 He also noted the bark’s positive effects on female reproduction—that cocolmeca restores healthy menstrual flows and “makes barren women fecund.”34 In the town of Rabinal in Verapaz, Maya residents reported that the pine nuts (piñónes del pino) that commonly grew in that region had similar dual properties. Their medical specialists used it to treat both typhus and to “provoke” menstruation.35 And the thin, fragrant leaves of the juanislama plant made into a poultice cured typhus and halted flujo de sangre (bloody flux) in women.36 Among the medicinal plant samples sent by Francisco Geraldino, alcalde mayor of Totonicapán in the 1780s, to the Audiencia president who was gathering such items to forward to doctors and scientists in Spain were leaves, sap, and bark from the Savino tree (madera de Savino) that grew along the area’s riverbanks.37 This plant cut short typhus and other “pestilential and malignant fevers by provoking sweat in the patient and restoring their body’s humoral balance” when used as an ingredient in a healing poultice, medicinal bath, or curative drink made from the tree’s bark.38 Geraldino warned, however, that medicines made from the tree’s sap “should not be used on pregnant women because it is a very strong abortifacient.”39 It is likely that home cures in this region utilized this plant not only to treat typhus but also to control pregnancy.

Mesoamerican Medicinal Uses of Thermal Baths, Temascales, and Bloodletting Official typhus treatments carried out as part of colonial public health campaigns prescribed the circulation of fresh air to a sick household to increase chances of survival.40 Mesoamerican typhus treatments, however, emphasized keeping patients warm, wrapping them in blankets, placing them close to the fire, and prescribing the use of temascales, warm medicalritual steam baths. An impor tant part of indigenous medical cultures

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concerned water knowledges—the therapeutic uses of steam in temascales, bathing for specific illnesses, and the healing properties of hot and cold water. Descriptions of Guatemala’s natural environment contain frequent references to indigenous uses of these forms of water to treat or ease various illness symptoms, alleviate problem pregnancies, and recover from childbirth. Since the arrival of the Spanish to Central America, many exhibited curiosity and interest in the region’s medicinal bathing sites. Travelers remarked on indigenous use of hot springs as they made their way through the Audiencia or as they described the geographic characteristics of their various postings in local communities. Fray Francisco Montero, living in Verapaz in the 1570s, remarked on the range of healthful waters found there for both bathing and drinking: There are some hot and healthful waters and baths in this land, and red, white and blue springs [that turn that color] because they passed through certain [mineral] veins in the earth, or because of the kinds of herbs or roots they contain. Some of these [taste] dreadful, because they pass through iron veins or other grave and bad tasting things. The rainwater of this land is very tasty and smooth . . . [and] the monastery has the best drinking water I have had.41

These observations demonstrate cross-cultural knowledge exchanges on the location and use of springs and baths, as well as the role of personal experience when Spaniards tried them out for themselves. Accounts provided the specific location of springs and their healing properties, showing both geographic knowledge and the circulation of information about medicinal water cultures: “Half a league from the Indian village of Cinacatlán there is a small spring that is good for cauterizing, and for the treatment of other troubles, but which is fatal if one drinks it.”42 Even this short description contains the detail needed for a reader to locate the spring: the name of the closest indigenous village, the specific distance from the village to the site and its specific healing properties, along with a warning not to drink the water. Guatemala’s many volcanoes produced numerous hot springs. Ximénez paid par ticular attention to sulfur hot springs, remarking that they all smelled bad, tasted worse, but did heal tumors.43 One sulfuric hot springs located along the road from the capital to Verapaz had waters so hot, people reportedly cooked food in it.44 Five hot springs “with famous baths” emerged from the Zacatecoluca volcano. The waters contained sulfur and alum that

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in addition to the volcanic heating of the waters enhanced its healthful qualities.45 Ciudad Vieja, a town located close to the capital, was known for its nearby hot springs. The buildings located around the springs made it more convenient to use for all kinds of residents, including the sick: “Near [Ciudad Vieja] toward the Fuego Volcano there are famous hot baths, where the city has put up a bathhouse with rooms and compartments for invalids, since the waters are very health-giving.”46 Fuego Volcano also produced the San Andrés thermal waters that flowed from the volcano’s base, known to cure a diverse range of illnesses. Nearby, a more temperate bath that gave the area a “sulfurous smell” had a reputation for curing sarna, literally meaning “itch,” most likely a kind of skin ailment.47 Some hot springs naturally contained salts and other minerals that gave them their healthful qualities. In other springs, bathers added their own. At the hot springs near the town of Zacapulas, market sellers sold a locally produced salt to bathers to medically enhance their baths.48 In other areas, enterprising residents extracted healing salts from their local springs and sold it in regional markets. Salt makers from the town of San Mateo Ixtatán harvested black-colored salt from the springs there that was known for its curative abilities.49 This salt was widely valued, as shown by the fact that tributary Indians in that town used the mineral as part of their repartimiento requirements and as payment for fees assessed by their parish church; they also sold it to residents of the towns in their area. In some contexts in the eighteenth century, bathing could be seen as healthful to colonial populations and was, for example, promoted on the pages of Guatemala’s Gazeta: “Baths are healthful for everyone; they consolidate the body and produce wondrous effects on the nerves, prevent skin diseases, and cure many others.”50 Chronicler Ximénez, intrigued when he frequently observed entire indigenous families bathing together, theorized that they believed that the hot springs “would help make [indigenous] women ready to conceive,” and that he has “seen this happen many times.”51 This only worked, according to Ximénez, for those women whose sterility was due to the “coldness of the uterus”; the hot springs warmed the womb to enhance their ability to conceive.52 Such writings on medicinal springs and bathing show that information exchange between Indians and the broader multiethnic colonial community included matters of female reproduction. Guatemala’s indigenous peoples not only practiced medicinal bathing, they also bathed in heated water vapors in a temascal. The temascal had formed a cornerstone of Mesoamerican medical-ritual cultures since preColumbian times.53 Ancient Mesoamericans also used some thermal

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springs as sacrificial locations.54 Mesoamerican healers treated many epidemic diseases in temascales, not only typhus but also measles and smallpox.55 Furthermore, temascales in Maya medical-ritual landscapes had broader uses past epidemic care: they were widely used to maintain health, mediate pregnancy and childbirth, and treat general illness in individuals and families. Colonial health care workers complained that many houses in the highlands had attached temascales, even the most humble homes, and that their use during outbreaks encouraged the spread of typhus.56 At the start of this set of outbreaks in the 1790s, Audiencia-sanctioned medical treatments prohibited the use of temascales. Protomédico José Flores warned in his “Instruction,” “do not let [the Indians] use temascales, because the way that the Indians use them is very bad for those sick with typhus. The Indian justices need to monitor this.”57 Many considered temascal use a distinctly Indian medical treatment: “[The Indians] have such passion for temascal use, that it is the only and general treatment used for every sickness.”58 From the perspective of the Protomedicato, temascales and the ritual specialists who healed there were in direct competition with colonial medical campaigns. As the epidemic continued, temascales loomed large in explanations for why doctors made no headway in treating the disease. Officials increasingly began to argue that their use spread typhus and made Indian patients who used them more likely to die: “The temascal is one of the principal and fatal causes of the spread of [typhus] fever among the Indians, where a group of the afflicted are placed together in a small room covered only in a wool blanket . . . which must be avoided by destroying the temascales and bringing the sick to the hospital where they can be rigorously monitored.”59 Doctors treating highland indigenous towns largely agreed that typhus’s effects were exacerbated by “frequent temascal steam baths, nudity, hunger, and lack of care.”60 In contrast, both Protomedicato-sanctioned typhus treatments and Mesoamerican medical cultures considered medicinal bloodletting a useful healing strategy. Colonial officials, however, made a careful distinction between Spanish and indigenous practices, emphasizing the superiority of colonial medicine’s approach: “Be careful with medicinal bloodletting that the Indians use with excess for all their illnesses, [letting blood] from the [body] part that [only] harms them. This is very dangerous for typhus victims.”61 According to the “Instructions,” bloodletters should not bleed men, boys, and girls. For the most part, women should not be bled either, only “young women if they are strong, or if their menstrual period is repressed, or if they are pregnant and in danger of miscarriage. In this case they should be bled from the arms.”62

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The official “Instructions” does not offer any specifics on the indigenous use of this therapy to treat typhus other than the vague assertion that Indian bleeders bled from different parts of the body than Spanish bloodletters. Furthermore, typhus outbreak records in this period generally did not record the names of Mesoamerican healers and the treatments they used for individual typhus patients. An exception to this is a description from the 1810s of diviner-healer Miguel Chonay, active in the highland towns around Lake Atitlán. Chonay had a geographically wide-ranging medical practice that included treatments for typhus. He came to the attention of colonial authorities for what some labeled his “superstitious commerce.” Indeed, Chonay’s medical-ritual activities divided the local community between those who considered him a gifted healer-diviner and his detractors, led by the parish priest, who labeled his activities “mistaken cures and bloodlettings” and “charms and sorceries.”63 Family members called Chonay to the sickbed of a man named Nicolás Excolin who was dying of typhus in the town of San Pedro de La Laguna in late spring of 1817. His wife, eighteen-year old Elena Rueche, along with her husband’s extended family, had gathered together at the home. First, the family had called the parish priest to administer last rights to Excolin. The priest conducted the ritual and additionally recommended “some sweats” to ease the dying man’s symptoms.64 After the priest departed, Excolin’s father called for the healer Chonay to treat his son.65 Chonay let blood and applied wet cupping applied above the heart, which the disease had caused to become “swollen and inflamed.”66 He also helped Excolin take the recommended “sweats” (likely in a temascal), but nothing brought relief. Chonay used divination with “crystal pieces” and “glass bottle stoppers,” whose signs he interpreted to show that Excolin lay close to death and would not recover. As part of the divination, Chonay asked the typhus patient’s wife Rueche “to look into the darkness of the materials so that she would be at peace with her husband.”67 This suggests that an aspect of treating dying individuals included treating surviving family members as well, here attending to their emotional needs as the death of their loved one approached. Excolin died a short time later.

To Los Montes When typhus broke out in late fall of 1796 in Cuchumatán towns, Audiencia president José Domas y Valle and Protomédico José Flores coordinated with Totonicapán province’s alcalde mayor, Francisco Xavier de Aguirre,

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to organize an official response and medical campaign.68 Flores circulated the most up-to- date treatment guidelines to the region on orders from the president in his “Instructions for How to Treat Typhus” that November, and handwritten copies began to make their way throughout the afflicted region.69 These revised instructions drew on older official treatment guidelines and added new information on tailoring plant-based medicines and other therapies to the particular geographic and botanical features of highland Maya tributary towns.70 As this epidemic dragged on, and as the adapted treatments seemed to have no effect, medical doctors and lay healers offered new ideas based on field experience, active experimentation, and by consulting Enlightenment-era medical literature on the disease for comparison, and then published and discussed their findings in the Gazeta de Guatemala and other venues.71 During the early years of this outbreak, facultativos (licensed medical doctors) tended to head the antityphus campaigns. Later, druggists, unlicensed doctors, and others stepped in to assist. Support personnel included epidemic inspectors, Spanish or ladino bloodletters, male and female caretakers hired from local communities, and other salaried campaign members. Facultativo Vicente Carranza led the antityphus medical campaign in Totonicapán province during the first stage of the outbreak, carrying with him “the medicines necessary to help the infested towns.”72 Vicente Bolinaga acted as an epidemic inspector and went ahead to towns such as Todos Santos to gather details and ready everything for the arrival of the campaign. He also administered bloodletting as needed.73 Medical personnel worked closely with intendants such as Alcalde Mayor Aguirre, who frequently traveled with the campaigns to the epidemic towns, mediating between the doctors and local Maya elites, sending the Audiencia updated reports on the epidemic’s status, and compiling new census counts of tributary Indians once the epidemic waned.74 The campaigns carried a significant amount of luggage with them, including fumigation ingredients, medical instruments, materials for record keeping and letter writing, and a well-stocked medicine chest.75 Doctors and their entourage fumigated their own luggage, clothes, papers, and medicines that they would carry with them to the next town so as not to spread the disease further.76 Facultativo Mariano Larrave ministered to typhus victims at the hamlet of Lacal, and from there planned to travel to Santa Eulalia. The ladino and Spanish alcaldes of the town of Santa Ana Malacatán provided written certification that confirmed that Larrave had followed all the fumigation guidelines needed to safely travel to the next town.77 Medical chests included insects, powders, plants, and other materials used

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to treat not only typhus but a variety of illnesses that might be encountered along the way. Carranza’s medical chest included the cantárides beetle used in poultices that Flores’s inoculation handbooks advocated for raising robust blisters for smallpox inoculation.78 When a medical doctor like Carranza arrived in an epidemic town, he consulted with the inspector and then immediately set to work visiting the sick in their homes and prescribing medicines, often with the parish priest and Indian alcaldes in tow.79 Bleeders such as Estanislao Argueta accompanied the epidemic doctors.80 Officials also inspected the graves of the epidemic dead to make sure that they reached the requisite depth. As part of the medical campaign’s efforts to counter indigenous typhus cures, officials attempted to locate and destroy each town’s temascales. Finally, they purchased food and clean bedding for particularly hard-hit communities. In the case of Santa Eulalia, campaign workers brought chickens to make nourishing broths and distributed forty-eight new sleeping mats to town residents.81 From October 1797 to March 1798, Doctor Carranza led one arm of the antityphus efforts on what must have been a grueling 110- day mission, adjusting his itinerary to head first to places with more severe outbreaks and returning to some areas more than once as needed. He crisscrossed a region of the Audiencia renowned for its difficult roads and challenging weather, first traveling from the capital to Santa María Chiquimula, then Todos Santos, San Martín Cuchumatán, San Sebastián, Santa Ysabel, San Juan Atitán, and Nebaj. After a brief break, he returned to Nebaj, then continued on to Huehuetenango, back to Chiquimula, back a third time to Nebaj, then Huehuetenango, finally returning to the capital.82 Carranza’s complex itinerary provides evidence for a flexible response to disease outbreaks, one that encompassed alert networks that shared information about regional variations and intensity of the epidemic’s development through letters and by word of mouth. This allowed leaders to adjust their response using the latest intelligence from the infected regions. Campaigns additionally prioritized their movement so as to protect important regional towns and the roads seen as the gateways to the capital city. Aguirre decided to alter a planned visit to one epidemic town in favor of another on the basis of recently received information, desiring “to halt the epidemic that has begun in these towns as they are the largest in this district, and to prevent the epidemic’s spread to San Francisco el Alto, and from there to Quetzaltenango, and from there to the capital.”83 Throughout this epidemic outbreak, community chest funds from Indian towns paid for medical salaries and supplies until they ran out. Once

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they did—and they inevitably did—campaign members sometimes fronted the costs with their own resources, at times donating them and other times requesting reimbursement from Audiencia authorities after the epidemic. Medical physician Toribio José Carbajal, who treated residents in San Francisco Jumaytepeque in November 1797, used his own funds to pay the freight costs of bringing medicines and other supplies to the town. He later provided a receipt and gained reimbursement from the Protomedicato.84 Sometimes priests contributed their own funds as well, as did the parish priest of Chiquimula, Sebastián Ruiz. Ruiz explained that residents could rely on his usual contribution, but he hoped “the country of Guatemala” also would help: “I am ready to make my own contribution, as I always have, for the care and relief of the poor parishioners of my pueblo, because these pueblos do not have any cofradía monies or other funds.”85 Once the typhus epidemic was under control in one town, the lead doctor, in consultation with the alcalde mayor and the parish priest, hired local ladinos or Hispanicized Indian men and women to care for recovering patients. When Doctor Carranza and the rest of the medical campaign decided Chiquimula had passed the serious outbreak stage, a married ladino couple from Momostenango, Nasario Guerra and Juana María Aguilera, cared for patients.86 The campaign then traveled to another nearby town where there were a few more typhus victims. After treating them, the campaign placed them in the care of a ladina widow named Magdalena Crespona.87 She promised to follow the typhus cure instructions to the letter in exchange for a salary of three reales per day, paid by parish priest Ruiz.88 In each instance where the care of convalescing patients was left in the hands of hired caretakers, medical campaign officials made sure to emphasize that these individuals had been taught to follow the Protomedicato treatment guidelines. Almost everyone associated with the antityphus campaigns complained about the ways that the region’s geography—its remoteness, dangerous roads, and cold damp weather—impeded the treatment of afflicted communities. Alcalde Mayor Aguirre described one of the typhus towns as “situated on a peak of a forest that is reached by more than a league of climbing, whose climate is very disturbed and cloudy because there is rain in all the months of the year.”89 The Protomedicato argued that these same environmental features promoted disease among those who lived there: “[Typhus is] a contagious and very dangerous disease, especially in the mountain towns that we call [the] highlands because these regions are cold and inclement, and interfere with perspiration to balance the bad air that helps to spread typhus.”90 Thus, medical science at the time held that Mayas who

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lived in this region had a higher susceptibility to typhus, a susceptibility exacerbated by the prevalence of a characteristic cold drizzle that local residents called Norte.91 Yet when antityphus campaigns arrived, frustrated doctors often found infected towns largely abandoned: “Our efforts have had no effect whatsoever because [the Indians] have fled up into the rugged adjacent areas, abandoning their farms and belongings.”92 As the epidemic raged in Concepción, the town’s annoyed parish priest reported that all the healthy Indian residents had left and “climbed up” to the mountain forests.93 Colonial authorities attributed Indian flight in epidemic times to fear or superstition. Digging deeper into the sources, however, reveals a more complicated picture: these same mountainous forests—los montes in the documents—offered highland Maya peoples refuge during outbreaks, a space to practice Mesoamerican medical-ritual activities, treat the sick, and mourn the dead away from the eyes of medical campaigns and parish priests.94 Flight in times of stress required a deep, sustained knowledge of the region among local residents of where to find sanctuary and temporary shelter to ride out the epidemic, the location of stable hunting areas to feed their families, and the ability to identify reliable supplies of fresh water. While los montes in highland Guatemala allowed for escape from colonial medical campaigns, these same forested mountains and ravines had long functioned as spaces of refuge and ritual activities in other situations as well. The Kaqchikel Maya had fled into the highland forests during their 1524–30 uprising against the Spanish conquering army and their Indian allies.95 Scholar Robert M. Hill notes that even outside of times of stress and rebellion, the Kaqchikel left colonial towns and “dispersed into the mountains and ravines where they formed small settlements that the Spanish call pajuides,” remote areas outside of the colonial system of taxation and religious conversion.96 The word “pajuides” is the Spanish approximation of the Kaqchikel Maya pa juyu’, meaning “in the mountains.”97 Indian flight to establish makeshift settlements in highland forested areas to escape epidemics or colonial medicine therefore forms one part of a long history of los montes as a place of refuge from state control. Mesoamerican healing cultures that took place in the hills and forests outside of towns are suggestive of how indigenous peoples utilized the landscape during epidemic times. A detailed investigation at the turn of the nineteenth century by colonial authorities in the primarily Kaqchikel Maya towns in and around Lake Atitlán reveal extensive ritual healing networks linked to the surrounding hilly landscape.98 Bartolomé Pérez practiced the

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“suspicious art” of magical healing “since he was very young,” with supporters respectfully referring to him as an adivino o Sahorin, a diviner with shape-shifting abilities.99 Pérez conducted his activities in “the most remote and secluded hills” marked by burning copal, especially in those known to the local Maya as Quixtalin and Chuchuc, and at a nearby third hill that towered above the town of Atitlán called Atitajullup.100 Pérez had become less mobile in recent years, so at the time of the investigation he had restricted his activities to a smaller ritual hill closer to town next to a stream, known as Chizah quill. Pérez treated his patients using medicinal bleeding, taking their extracted blood and sprinkling it along the banks of the river while “saying prayers” for the sick.101 There were many other indigenous curanderos adivinos active in the towns around Lake Atitlán, including Jerónimo Exvalam (a high- status maestro), Pedro Ahcot, Pedro Pacay, Manuel González, Andrés Matías, Gaspar Canó, Santiago Ramírez, Diego Rodríguez, Juan Pujul, Diego Tuh, and Antonio Chul. All used medical divination with “stones or crystals” along with candles, copal, and “diabolical prayers” to treat their patients.102 The men had access to a ritual book described as a libro al modo diurno, perhaps an almanac, “that they read before their relatives who kneel before them.”103 Then the healer and patient walked together into los montes, “where there is a cross. There at midnight they confess, preparing for the ritual with a prayer to whom everyone calls Ahüapop, that means Lords or Forested Hills, of Cajabón, of Cobán, of Chajul de Navah, of Atitlán, and to the volcanoes that are called Ytzel Uinac. And for this ceremony they light Castillian lights and copal. They call for their sick to be freed from their illnesses.”104 Los montes as a geographic space contained within it natural objects and landscapes considered impor tant to medical-ritual activities—hot springs, mountains, volcanoes, trees, and caves—all of which could be sacred beings as well.105 In these sacred spaces, ritual specialists “began the medicines” and treated the sick, applying dry cupping, bloodletting, and wet cupping with blood extraction.106 In one of the rituals that took place at sunset, healers dressed in special clothing to mark the occasion “that they stored in a box in the house of the alcalde of the same Saint’s cofradía.”107 Participants unrolled a lienzo, a painting that showed the face of a man called Diego Martín, and another of the image of Santo Bautista, “and that one they worshipped the most, calling him their God, and worshipping it they passed the entire night.”108 These activities in Mesoamerican medical cultures underscore the connections between human healers, supernatural beings, and sacred landscapes.

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As the epidemic in the highlands dragged on into the 1800s, medical campaign workers became exasperated by the tenacity of the disease, their inability to halt its spread, and the “empty” stricken communities. Mariano Larrave, the medical doctor working in Santa Eulalia, complained that “[the cure] has not had the effect that I had hoped, because the majority of this town now resides in the mountains that the Indians call tierra caliente (warm lowlands). It is from there that the inhabitants return to town [to be treated], already dead, already infected, and in a physical state that renders the methods of the [medical] arts ineffective.”109 Parish priest José María Orellana expressed similar views: “A large number of Indians have abandoned their community for the coast. Many others have settled on a tract of land called Payconó, which belongs to the Indians of San Miguel Acatán, and some are in the warmer lowlands belonging to their own community. These people bring the bodies of victims, who die without any spiritual comfort whatsoever, back to their home town for burial.”110 Widespread Indian flight led colonial officials to call for forcibly resettling indigenous community members back into tributary towns and placing the sick in temporary epidemic hospitals, a way to combat illicit ritual healing activities in the forests and ensure that the dying received last rites and a Christian burial. Medical campaign workers and other supporters of this tactic used the verb “reducir,” the same word used to describe the forced resettlement of dispersed Indian communities into tributary towns that had long been a cornerstone of colonial rule.111 As one epidemic doctor wrote, “where possible, destroy the temascales and place the sick in hospitals, where they [the Indians] can be rigorously monitored according to the described [medical] regimen.”112 Epidemic hospitals became analogous to Indian tributary towns, where parish priests and doctors monitored medical orthodoxy. In 1797, when colonial officials arrived in Concepión and learned that most of the residents had fled to los montes, they coordinated with the accompanying militia soldiers, conscripted fifteen to twenty Indian men from other towns in the other six Jacaltenango parish pueblos to accompany militia soldiers, and sent them up to the mountains to forcibly return residents back to town.113 The soldiers and conscripts brought down as many Concepción residents as they could locate so that the sick could be treated and monitored with colonial medicine and its representatives.114 Doctors envisioned that temporary epidemic hospitals, with their regulated typhus treatments, would explicitly counter los montes as a medicalritual space. Doctor Mariano Larrave argued that “only hospitals can restrain the boldness of the Indians.”115 He proposed turning Santa Eulalia’s parish

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church into an infirmary with twenty-five beds, connecting the medical with the spiritual in the hopes that the residents would find this more appealing. Continued complaints, however, make it clear that the colonial resettlement practices that targeted Indians who had strategically escaped to los montes met with mixed success at best. Larrave prepared to use force as part of this process when he asked the Audiencia to send two soldiers to help him bring the sick from their homes to the infirmary, quarantine them, and prevent family members from entering and caring for them. Instead, Larrave hired a Hispanicized Indian named Mateo Virbes for the job.116 Santa Eulalia’s parish priest explained that “because the hospital disgusted the Indians, they have fled to the mountains.”117 Priest Juan José Juárez noted the difficulties he faced obtaining an accurate postepidemic death count and tribute census because so many of the typhus sick and their families had fled to los montes, and likely died there as well.118

Of “Pagan” Temples and Sacred Caves Surveillance undertaken by antityphus campaigns to ensure compliance with Protomedicato treatment guidelines, and the conflicts surrounding them found in field reports sent to provincial and Audiencia officials, reveals the depth and breadth of Mesoamerican medical cultures at the turn of the nineteenth century. They document the ways that Maya ritual specialists and community members drew on the rich landscape of Mesoamerican medical cultures not only to treat individuals, but also to treat entire communities by means of a sacred geography of caves and other natural and man-made spaces with ritual-medical significance. Medical campaign workers and their allies attempted to destroy them to publicly undermine Mesoamerican medicine in ideological and practical terms, using discourses and strategies reminiscent of earlier anti-idolatry campaigns. In 1797, a young Indian man told the parish priest of Concepción, Fray Juan de la Rosa, about an adoratorio located just outside of town along the banks of the nearby river. This was one of two major so-called pagan temples discovered by colonial officials during this intense period of epidemic outbreaks.119 When it became known that de la Rosa intended to inspect the shrine, the town’s residents became so incensed that they wanted “to throw him off a cliff.”120 Instead, the weather intervened: a strong storm with a whirlwind hit the area that scared him so much that he was forced to return to town.121 De la Rosa then notified Alcalde Mayor Aguirre of the

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adoratorio’s existence, known to local residents as Bacu. Aguirre set out for Concepción accompanied by armed militiamen and by ladinos and Indian men “who know the language” of Jakaltek Maya.122 Aguirre brought militiamen with him because he expected significant resistance from local residents to the inspection of the adoratorio, “where they have made sacrifices to the Devil,” because of the heightened tensions caused by the epidemic. Aguirre gave the soldiers “secret orders” to take the Indian alcaldes by surprise by slipping into town and forcing them to bring the outsiders to Bacu. The bilingual men went along too, acting as linguistic spies to report on what Concepción’s Indian alcaldes said to each other, in case their conversations revealed important information about the site.123 The group set off to find Bacu, but the Indian alcaldes did not take them to the shrine. Instead, they led the group in circles “so as to, without a doubt, tire us out. They did not do what I asked.”124 One spy reported that choirmaster Francisco Ramírez warned in Jakaltek never to reveal the adoratorio’s location, even if the officials threatened death.125 Aguirre immediately arrested the choirmaster and three Indian alcaldes and separated them from each other.126 The soldiers lashed the first alcalde twelve times, until finally he agreed to take them to the adoratorio. Aguirre sent the man to find the shrine, accompanied by an officer, four soldiers, and an Indian translator. The same sequence of events was repeated with the remaining Indian men in the hope that at least one would lead the group to the true site. The Indian alcalde in Aguirre’s group took them down a narrow path to the San Marcos River. There they found the first group returning with news that they had successfully located the adoratorio. Everyone joined together and walked along the river to its headwaters. There lay Bacu, an impressive site consisting of two buildings. The first was constructed of very fine stone and had two doors. The second, called “The Cave,” had a small dome. This is where the faithful said prayers and made ritual sacrifices to Cuman and Culmi, Mesoamerican beings whose names Aguirre translated as “The Great Lord and the Heart of the Great Lady.”127 Trees encircled both buildings so that their branches and lianas formed arches. Inside The Cave, Aguirre found the black clay female figure of Culmi surrounded by ashes and candles; additional candles decorated the ceiling. Informants refused to reveal the location of the Cuman image. Colonial officials searched for it but never managed to locate it. Aguirre ordered the buildings destroyed and the broken pieces thrown into the river. Thirty armed militia soldiers then placed “a great wooden cross on the site, blessed by the parish priest.”128

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Indigenous political officials and elders from Concepción had regularly led nighttime processions to Bacu for agricultural ceremonies and to protect the health of the village.129 Birth rituals also took place there. After a child was born, the father went to the site to make an offering to Cuman, burned candles and copal incense, and prayed for the infant’s health. Four times a year, the town’s most respected elders gathered with two of the town’s justices to make offerings to Cuman and Culmi. These ceremonial dates were tied to the ritual-agricultural cycle that protected the community as a whole: the early January visit marked the beginning of the yearlong office of the town’s justice, and the May visit asked for rains for their crops. The ritual that took place in July or August asked for “a good harvest from their milpas and to protect the health of the Indians.” The final ritual of the calendar year took place at Christmas, when participants “went to give thanks to Cuman, and to Culmi, because they had lived through another year.”130 The men prepared by fasting for three days and living separately from their wives. On the third day they decapitated a turkey and then burned its blood, mixed with copal, on a clay offering plate. That night at midnight they walked to the adoratorio, where they burned the sacrificed turkey at the entrance to The Cave, offering prayers to Cuman.131 After the adoratorio’s destruction, authorities ordered the town’s tributary Indian residents who had survived the typhus outbreak to gather in the central plaza. This militarized public event—the plaza was ringed with militia soldiers—aimed to demonstrate the reach of colonial power not only to Concepción residents but also to the Indian alcaldes in the other parish pueblos, who were also required to attend.132 Priest Macedonio Saravía led a series of rituals to reassert Christian religious authority over the town. This included a ceremony where Saravía “absolved [the Indians] of their apostasy and idolatry so that from now on they can be better Christians and not be damned [to hell].”133 Following the religious ceremony, colonial officials conducted a posttyphus epidemic census of surviving tributary Indians, a way to update the rolls and also reestablish colonial authority in the aftermath of an epidemic. Saravía carried with him the most recent census, along with the town’s baptism and burial books, so that names could be checked with the rolls to verify claims of deaths from typhus.134 When the census concluded, officials notified the crowd that they would now begin to burn down all buildings that had housed those who died from typhus, one of the more controversial antityphus strategies there and elsewhere in the highlands.135 While Concepción residents remained occupied by these mandatory public activities, a small military patrol left town to inspect the adoratorio

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site to verify that the entrance remained blocked. The patrol included Lieutenant Joaquín Montejo, soldiers Cayetano Miguel and Juan Camposeco, and a member of the medical campaign, Vicente Bolinaga. The group concluded that residents had not reopened it because the cross remained undisturbed. Furthermore, the patrol found no footprints or other signs to indicate that residents had recently visited the site.136 A second major adoratorio came to light during the typhus outbreak in July of 1800, when an indigenous political office holder from Santa Eulalia alerted the parish priest of the existence of a sacred cave located on the outskirts of the town.137 Thirteen ídolos (idols) mounted on individual altars populated the cave, including three corn-grinding stones and multiple sets of deer antlers. Each had its own offering plate that contained remnants of burnt copal. The cave also encompassed what officials described as el corazón del maíz (the corn or maize heart), which provided additional protection to the pueblo.138 K’anjob’al Maya ritual specialists, members of the town’s important family lineages and office holders in the Indian cabildo, made offerings inside the cave to mediate epidemics, promote bountiful harvests, deter bad weather and locusts, and protect the town’s residents from hunger and famine.139 The parish priest, Juan José Juárez, notified Alcalde Mayor Aguirre to the cave’s existence “and the uses and customs that the Indians have preserved there since antiquity.”140 Juárez waited eight weeks for Aguirre to arrive in Santa Eulalia so that the two could inspect the cave together “and prepare a remedio, with the goal of eliminating these abuses and superstitions that these miserable Indians have immersed themselves in.”141 In choosing the word “remedio” to refer to a religious response to idolatrous behavior, Juárez used the same word that a doctor used for a medical cure, linking the idea that medicine cured illnesses as Christianity “cured” idolatry. Meanwhile, he regularly preached sermons to his indigenous parishioners, warning them against using “idolatries and divinations.”142 While Juárez waited, however, he never mentioned the cave directly “because of [his] fear and mistrust [of Santa Eulalia residents], [and] that it would cause a popular rebellion and other things best avoided.”143 Juárez’s worry that residents might use violence against him if he spoke out against the cave was a reasonable one. A few years earlier, when San Juan Atitlán’s parish priest discovered the use of traditional Maya ceremonies there and tried to halt them, “an armed and angry population chased him out of town.”144 Highland adoratorios and the practices that took place there had remained either hidden from the Spanish view or were tolerated, ignored, or overlooked as religious power waned in the region over the course of the

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Figure 2. Maya cave with “idols” where rituals were performed to prevent or halt epidemic diseases, protect crops, and ensure good harvests. Santa Eulalia, eighteenth century. AGCA A1-2804-24640, “Intendencia Totonicapán, 1800. El alcalde mayor de esta Provincia . . . haber decubierto una cueva, f. 9. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Centro América, Guatemala City, Guatemala.

eighteenth century and as religious administration transitioned away from the missionary orders.145 This was the case for Santa Eulalia’s sacred cave: apparently priests in the area had been aware of this site for decades.146 The threat to isolated colonial authorities in the highlands, in addition to the economic support for the missionary orders provided by the Maya, led to a culture of tolerance toward Mesoamerican ritual activities and sacred spaces.147 This practice began to change during epidemic outbreaks, however, as colonial medical campaigns strug gled to treat the highland Maya. Aguirre arrived in Santa Eulalia in September. He quickly put together a group to investigate the cave and its contents, including Juárez and his nephew Don Manuel Bueda, K’anjob’al magistrates and other officials from Santa Eulalia and neighboring San Mateo Ixtatán, the town’s schoolmaster, and the informant, the fiscal José López. The group walked to the entrance atop a steep hill. Aguirre noted that the path to the cave’s entrance was “well

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worn,” indicating its frequent use.148 The magistrates entered first and lit candles for the group because the cave’s interior was “muddy and dark.”149 Next, López and Don Manuel entered the cave together and recorded detailed information about its layout, size, and contents. This inspection likely provided the information for a series of reports that included the production of an extraordinary map titled Plan de la Cueva (Cave Layout) depicting the site’s rooms, passageways, and the location of the thirteen images and their offering plates.150 The map shows the cave’s location on a mountaintop and its entryway surrounded by a milpa field filled with healthy corn stalks growing in carefully drawn crop rows. Outlines of large stones delineated the arched cave entrance, the walls of the first room, and the important central “cupola room.” The two main cave passageways leading south and west were marked with tiny dots that indicated a muddy floor, showing that water was present in the cave. Mesoamerican ritual caves often contained springs and wet areas. Activities tended to take place at or near those wet areas, where animal and blood sacrifices were made and supplicants burned copal incense, whose black smoke metaphorically represented rain clouds.151 Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have documented the longstanding importance of caves as ritual sites in Mesoamerican culture and religion. Caves were considered living sacred spaces from where humans first emerged, and where impor tant gods dwelled.152 The ceremonial centers of ancient Mesoamerican peoples “were literally constructed as arrays of mountain-pyramids and cave-temples.”153 Impor tant buildings at the Maya site Dos Pilas in Guatemala were constructed above “a complex warren of caves and were aligned to reflect these subterranean chambers.”154 According to anthropologist Karl Taube, “such structures were considered entrances to the underworld.”155 Ancient Mesoamericans understood that ritual caves functioned both as “the generative womb of the earth that is, at the same time, the guardian of natural forces such as the wind and water.”156 They provided sacred spaces for rites of passage for individuals and communities such as rituals that marked childbirth, baptism or initiation, and pregnancy, as well sociopolitical acts and death rituals.157 The cave entrance was located near Santa Eulalia’s Calvary, an openair space that represented Christ’s crucifi xion, and so an impor tant Christian site that had perhaps been deliberately placed above the cave’s entrance.158 The site might have been marked with a large cross, visible to Santa Eulalia’s inhabitants, as many such sites were in colonial Guatemala.159 Anthropologist Oliver La Farge describes Santa Eulalia’s Calvary

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Figure 3. Maya cave with detail showing a cornfield, the cave entrance, and the important cupola room with “idols” in a niche. Santa Eulalia, eighteenth century. AGCA A1-2804-24640, “Intendencia Totonicapán, 1800. El alcalde mayor de esta Provincia . . . haber decubierto una cueva, f. 9. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Centro América, Guatemala City, Guatemala.

as an impor tant community site as it existed during the early twentieth century: “The Calvario is a very simple building at the southwestern end of the village. Before it stand the crosses of San Sebastián and San José and a group of three crosses without name, which represent the three crosses of the Crucifixion.”160 The Calvary is located “almost directly above” the entrance of Santa Eulalia’s sacred cave, named Yalan Na’ by his modern informants. La Farge argued that the cave, the Calvary and its crosses, and a sacred hill across the valley called Yalañ K’u formed ritually linked geographies, sites of “communication with the sacred inhabitants of those spots.”161

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Santa Eulalia’s cave is organized into separate sectors with different ritual uses that “suggest a ceremonial circuit.”162 The map shows distinct rooms and passageways, with a total of thirteen images and offering plates, and so indicates a ritual circulation in use during the colonial period as well. Furthermore, the thirteen images with offering plates possibly correspond to the Maya Short Count calendar of thirteen baktun (a baktun corresponds to 7,200 days).163 In the southern passage, a rock rose from the cave floor and formed an altar. Three pestles (picos and piedras de moler), one tall and two medium-size (numbers 10, 11, and 13 on the map) were located on each, tools used for grinding corn to make masa for tortillas and atoles, a corn-based drink common in the highlands. Aguirre described these images enigmatically as “without the body of a rational or irrational creature.”164 Yet he assumed they were “idols” because all had accompanying offering plates “and [because] everything is black from the smoke of burnt copal and ocote,” a prized wood from a pine tree native to Mesoamerica and widely used in ritual activities.165 The report emphasizes copal as key evidence for ritual activity in the cave because, as one chronicler observed, it was well-known that “Indians use copal to incense their idols and the saints.”166 La Farge also noted the continued link between Maya rituals and copal use in the twentieth century: “[Copal’s] place in old Mayan [sic] ritual is historic. The smoke from this, as well as from the resin, is supposed to represent the rising of the clouds which bring the rains. In this section the rain clouds roll in from the low country to the north in great masses and come up over the intervening high ridges before they cover the sky and release their waters.”167 Halfway down the western passage, another rock altar (number 5 on map) featured two sets of deer antlers with the same visual and olfactory traces of copal as in the southern passage. Other regional examples of the importance of deer as objects of veneration existed among the Maya living in the Cuchumatanes in this time period. When Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz conducted his inspection during the late 1760s, he noted the frequent presence of deer antlers on home altars.168 He described how residents of the town of Malacatán worshipped a Lord of the Deer (Señor de los Venados), associated with hunting. Successful hunters brought the dead animal into the home and placed it on a petate. If it was a doe, they laid a cloth over its head, and if it was a buck they placed “certain adornments” on its antlers. Then participants encircled the animal’s body with lit candles and said a series of prayers.169 These activities indicate the important place of deer in highland society and ritual life for individual homes and for communities. Indeed, parish priest Juárez noted a similar reverence for

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deer antlers and bones in all the towns of Soloma parish during the typhus epidemic: Most of the homes of these towns have home altars decorated with deer bones and antlers, and the bones of pumas, dogs, and monkeys and other [animals] on top of their home altars, with crosses placed nearby. They kneel in front of the altars decorated with animal bones, light candles, burn copal, [and] pray according to their ancient customs (rezar sus costumbres), asking for the health of the sick person in their house.170

When a woman was close to giving birth, according to the priest, families gathered in front of these same altars, including the woman and the man’s parents, to “admit their sins, and divine the sex of the fetus.”171 The deer antlers and other images found in the cave had been under the care of Santa Eulalia’s ritual specialists and elders Sebastián Cota, Francisco Cota, Simón Diego, Francisco Pablo, and Diego Ramón.172 Each man was at least forty years old, all yndios ancianos, members of the highly respected older generation. Juárez himself recognized these men as community elders and ritual specialists: “Everyone respects, with particular veneration, these five Indians as fathers of the pueblo in the manner of priests (sacerdotes),” using the same word that he would use to refer to himself as a priest. Of the five men, two were heads of calpul grandes, the town’s most impor tant lineages, and the other three were from lower-ranked lineages. Santa Eulalia’s calpules also provided the town’s political office holders. The concept and term “calpul” predated the arrival of the Spanish and continued to be a meaningful concept throughout the colonial period. Calpules provided both political and ritual leadership in the town to at least the early nineteenth century, leadership that would be particularly welcome and needed during times of epidemic and environmental stresses. Maya ritual specialists in towns throughout Soloma and Jacaltenango parishes frequently used divination, and that residents consulted “some master of divination” for healing the sick.173 Santa Eulalia’s calpul elders practiced “divinations and prognostications” as well, including in the cave. These activities worked in part to protect the community from epidemics and famine.174 After the inspection of the cave, Santa Eulalia’s first alcalde and the other elders were arrested and given twelve lashes each. Parish priest Juárez warned Aguirre that the public whipping and subsequent imprisonment of the men would not cause the town’s residents to lose respect for these men’s leadership. Rather, “the Indians in the pueblo know that these men are

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destined to care for the cave,” suggesting that they were supernaturally chosen for those important roles and that this was widely known and accepted among the townspeople.175 Aguirre then left Santa Eulalia with the accused men and imprisoned them in Huehuetenango. Juárez worried that his parishioners still considered the cave the town’s ritual center. To counter this, he used his sermons to draw clear distinctions between Maya and Catholic sacred spaces: “There is no more cave other than that of the Holy Church, and no one should be worshipped except God the Trinity and the One, creator of the sky and earth.”176 Before leaving town, Aguirre and his entourage blocked the cave entrance, making it “impossible to enter.” Archaeological and epigraphic evidence show that cave desecration—looting or destroying the contents and blocking or destroying access to specific rooms or to the cave as a whole— formed an impor tant aspect of Classic Era Maya warfare.177 Given the cave’s importance and that colonial officials blocked the entrance in the midst of the epidemic, residents would have considered this a provocative act with potentially dire consequences for the town. Indeed, a few days after the closure, townspeople experienced “great confusion and dread,” and many feared this would bring further “plague” and “famine” to Santa Eulalia, and “kill their children.”178 A group of men and women from the town gathered together and reopened the cave. They then proceeded inside where, according to Juárez, they began to “worship” the deer antlers. Without the threat from the provincial governor and his men, the priest had no power to confront the crowd, nor it seems was he able to convince residents to stop considering the cave a sacred space. Throughout 1801 and into 1802, officials repeatedly decried the need to “exterminate the superstitions in the town” of Santa Eulalia, in addition to referencing some twenty more adoratorios that came to light in the region while the epidemic continued.179

Resisting and Reshaping Colonial Medicine in the Highlands The highland Maya in late colonial Guatemala used strategic flight to evade colonial medicine during typhus outbreaks and practiced distinct ritualmedical cultures in sacred spaces, such as caves, led by Indian elites whose responsibilities for individuals and their communities joined political, religious, and medical roles in post-conquest Central America. Other times, colonial medicine and Mesoamerican medicine came into direct and at

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times violent confrontation with each other over medical therapies, forced hospitalization, and changing burial practices for the epidemic dead. Sometimes Maya opposition even generated armed confrontation with medical officials and their supporters, but most proved short-lived and none spread past an individual community. Yet colonial authorities at the provincial and Audiencia level often exaggerated their seriousness, characterizing them as uprisings and rebellions, sending in militias, and conducting fraught, tense negotiations with local leaders in which medical campaigns at times had to adjust their policies and therapies to defuse the situation. When, in the fall of 1797, news arrived of a typhus outbreak in Nebaj, physician Vicente Carranza traveled to the town and began to implement Protomedicato-approved treatments. By December, Carranza and parish priest Francisco Abello thought they had begun to get the outbreak under control with bloodletting, treating not only the sick but the healthy as well.180 The doctor and the priest were so confident that they turned down Alcalde Mayor Aguirre’s offer of help imposing the mandated bloodletting, maintaining that “the Indians got along well with everybody” and were submitting to the prescribed antityphus measures.181 These included the newly consecrated Campo Santo built on the edge of town to deal with the overflow of dead from the parish church cemetery.182 Amid these hopeful signs, however, troubling news arrived that the town’s alcalde de milpas elect had died along with his wife a few days earlier, orphaning their five young children. Deaths of local officials were a frequent occurrence in epidemic towns, illuminating the problems of maintaining a stable local leadership and of caring for orphans in cases where both parents and other adult relatives had died.183 Eleven days later, on January 2, 1798, everything had “turned fatal” in Nebaj.184 Two issues set off the conflict: the active resistance of Ixil Maya residents to the Protomedicato-mandated bloodletting and typhus treatments, and the refusal of the townspeople to use the new Campo Santo to bury the epidemic dead.185 At first the townspeople had presented themselves for bloodletting, but then the numbers inexplicably began to dwindle. Abello and Carranza attributed the decline to a spate of bad weather, expecting the bloodlettings to resume once the weather improved. But the men waited four days, and still no more came. Finally, Nebaj’s Indian alcaldes announced that “no one wanted to come, neither for bloodletting, nor for medical treatment.”186 In response, the priest and the doctor went house to house through the town to treat everyone directly. When they entered Indian residences, however, they found only “resistance and evasion”—family members hid the

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sick from them, and those who remained refused to submit to bloodletting.187 Perhaps this is not unexpected given the ritual and biological significance of human blood in Mesoamerican cultures and the fact that Maya healers also practice bloodletting for typhus, but differently from those methods sanctioned by colonial medicine. According to Abella, the reason Nebaj’s indigenous residents refused to submit to the treatments and bloodletting was because of “their belief that a great duende walks here, who [steals] a person’s spirit or soul (ánima).”188 The origin of the word “duende” derives from the Arabic word “duar.” A duende in eighteenth-century Spanish cultures referred to a kind of goblin or demon thought to infest houses and crossroads.189 In colonial-period Guatemala and today, “duende” can be used interchangeably with the Maya word “alux,” meaning guardian.190 Alba González has suggested that the duende is one of many super natural beings that are known as the “Señores de la naturaleza” (Lords of Nature.) They live in the Cerro Alux, located west of the present- day municipio of Mixco in Guatemala: “It is possible that in this location they are known as ‘Seven Ears,’ found in the ancient pre-Hispanic shamanic ceremonies. This is why the idea persists that the hill, or even better these mountain ranges, are enchanted [with supernatural beings], and that they are found to be in the possession of a duende.”191 Guatemalan author Celso Lara notes that the brujos and respected elders of Mixco say that the Cerro Alux (Alux Hill), whose slopes tower above the town, is enchanted [with supernatural beings]. They assert that El Señor del Cerro (The Lord of the Hill) refers to Yuq’Alux, he who gives wealth to those who ask, as he did to Tiburcio Sabaj . . . , to whom the hill gave much so money that he could completely rebuild the town of Mixco after the earthquakes of 1917 and 1918.192

The reference by the priest Abello to the duende is enigmatic here, with no further reference made to this entity in the sources. But perhaps this referenced Maya beliefs that Spanish-style bloodletting made people more susceptible to the soul-stealing activities of the duendes that traversed Mesoamerican landscapes. Tensions increased when the consecration of the new Campo Santo took place on Sunday, December 31, the same day as the death of a newborn from typhus.193 Doctor Carranza made it clear to the Indian principales and justices that for health reasons everyone now had to be buried in the Campo Santo, including the infant. At first the residents agreed, and the priest wrote

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that “we were happy to see these hijos (“children,” e.g., the Indian residents) act so obediently.”194 The next day, New Year’s Day, however, three more Nebaj residents died from typhus. At two in the afternoon, while the priest was speaking with Carranza in his residence at the parish church, many Indian women arrived, crying and all speaking at once. Abello asked that one woman explain what had happened. The spokeswoman for the group told him “all night we heard the cries of the infant buried yesterday there [in the Campo Santo].”195 Now three more residents had died of typhus overnight, and “all of us in the town have come to ask that no one else be forced to be buried in the new place, but instead be buried here, in our church.”196 Abello and Carranza went out to the patio to talk to the women and to try and explain why using the Campo Santo would be better for their health. Things escalated when townsmen gathered outside the building, “some armed with machetes, others with sticks.”197 The doctor’s pleas that they use the Campo Santo fell on deaf ears, and the Indians left saying “that they would bury their dead where they pleased.”198 The priest called the townspeople’s behavior a sublevación, an uprising: “We considered ourselves to be a city in revolt, where there is no one else except Indians, and many of them have firearms (armas de fuego).”199 Aguirre agreed, and called the Nebaj events a popular commotion (commoción popular).200 Surrounded by “these malcontented souls,” the medical campaign workers closed themselves up for safety with the priest in his living quarters in the parish church. At dusk, Indian residents entered church grounds and dug three graves designated for that day’s typhus victims “with much insolence. And the wails in the church did not stop until they had been buried.”201 The burials complete, the crowd left around 8 p.m., while the priest and the doctor waited in fear “for what we were sure would be our certain deaths.”202 Next, the townspeople headed to the Campo Santo where they disinterred the newborn’s body from its grave. They carried the corpse to the church and reburied it there, finishing around eleven in the evening, after which, according to the priest, the church fell silent. Indians conducting nighttime rituals in local churches without the presence of the parish priest were not an uncommon occurrence either before or after the events that took place in Nebaj. In other highland towns, Maya ritual specialists and their followers carried out activities in churches at night without the presence of parish priests (though at times spied on by them) and at the graves of the epidemic dead in newly consecrated cemeteries, their activities marked by flickering candles, sacrificed animal blood, and the smell of copal incense. Curandero adivinos in towns around Lake

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Atitlán used the parish church at night “many times” for healing rituals, burning copal and candles in the building.203 In Jacaltenango in the 1770s, the Mercedarian friar in charge of the parish reported to the archbishop that Maya ritual specialists frequently used the church at night. The priest tried to stop the activity by having “good doors” put on the church, but this did not halt the practice. Jacaltenango’s new priest was much less tolerant of this custom, reportedly beating Indian alcaldes and principales when he found them burning copal while praying at the church. He additionally removed the choirmaster from office, threatened to remove the alcaldes from office, and eventually excommunicated the entire town.204 At some point between the nights of January 1 and January 5, the only representatives of the colonial state remaining in the town fled for their lives—the priest Abello escaped to Cotzal, a nearby town in the same parish, while Carranza and Vicente Bolinaga (the medical campaign’s bloodletter) left for Huehuetenango, where, according to Carranza, “we arrived [safely] entirely by luck.”205 Carranza sent a written report to Aguirre in which he corroborated Abello’s description of the chain of events: the refusal of the townspeople to medicinarse, to accede to the bloodlettings and other medical treatments, and the exhumation and reburial of the infant who died of typhus. He added that the Indian justices and principales knew and approved of these actions.206 Colonial medical campaigns in remote indigenous towns in large part depended on forming alliances with indigenous elites and others to establish and maintain order during outbreaks and to transmit official medical treatments. Thus, the described defection of Nebaj’s Ixil Maya elites proved a serious issue indeed. Carranza pointed out the imposition of colonial medicine and changes in burial practices had led to a series of Lacandón Maya riots: “These are the same reasons that prompted those Lacandones to riot, threatening to kill us if we prevented their actions, and knowing their strength and the signs that this would only end in a tragedy for us . . . we responded to their insolence with friendly and kind words.”207 Shaken by his experience leading the medical campaigns in Nebaj and other tense experiences during the outbreak, Carranza decided that “in light of this event I have decided that I will not travel to another Indian town, risking my life and exposing myself to the rashness of these barbarians, without your presence and your armed men. Because otherwise it will be a slaughter.”208 Resistance to colonial typhus treatments also emerged in Todos Santos. Carranza and Aguirre in the end could not persuade residents there to accede to forced medicinal bloodletting or to shifting burials to the new

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Campo Santo. When campaign workers and militia soldiers proposed to destroy 82 infected house and buildings, tensions came to a head. In this instance, Aguirre resorted to force rather than persuasion, and traveled to the town with 24 militia men to destroy the infected homes and buildings. After completing the destruction in Todos Santos, the entourage continued on, burning an additional 14 infected homes and buildings in nearby San Martín Cuchumatán and another 106 in Concepción.209 Aguirre did not think that Carranza overreacted to the seriousness of the situation in Nebaj. As soon as Aguirre received word that its residents had revolted on New Year’s Day, he notified the Audiencia and began organizing a military response.210 After reading the reports circulated by Aguirre, some in the Audiencia advocated a harsh response, including Carranza and Abello, who argued that without one, other epidemic towns will similarly ignore or resist colonial medical and burial mandates: “I say that this event demands the most severe punishment because of the nature of the crime, and so that the example [made of the participants] will act as a brake to the other pueblos, who will do the same thing if we act with gentleness against the delinquents.”211 The seriousness of the situation can also be seen in the call for an entrada, with the necessary soldiers and military equipment “to instill terror in those Indians.”212 Entrada was a term used to describe colonial military conquest or reconquest of native peoples in the early colonial period, and military campaigns against peoples and towns in rebellion or against occupied port cities later on in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The goal of the entrada was “to use whatever methods are needed to achieve pacification of the Indians.”213 Aguirre warned Audiencia authorities that Nebaj residents might encourage two nearby towns of Chajul and Cotzal to also resist the medical campaigns, as all three were located very close together in a remote area. The priest sent a list to Aguirre that named Nebaj’s residents whom he considered the leading perpetrators, and Aguirre planned to arrest them. A recent census had counted 4,953 residents in 3 towns that made up Nebaj’s parish, 932 of them tributaries. Given these large population numbers, and the participation of both Nebaj men and women in the uprising, some of whom were armed with firearms, Aguirre estimated that he would need at least 300 soldiers to return the town to colonial control. To date, however, Aguirre had managed to procure only 3 militia companies with 50 guns (fuziles), but he did not have a lot of faith in those soldiers, noting that they “are militias in name only.”214 Furthermore, Aguirre faced some important tactical obstacles, including the town’s remote location,

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the poor roads that led there, Nebaj’s “rebellious” reputation, and the area’s “Indianness” and general lack of ladino and Spanish residents. Aguirre continued to work through the Audiencia bureaucracy to gather the necessary soldiers, intelligence, and gunpowder that he believed he needed for a successful entrada.215 In a letter dated January 18, more than two weeks after the event, the president of the Audiencia approved Aguirre’s request for one arroba of gunpowder, about twenty-five pounds. The Audiencia also approved Aguirre’s request for funds to pay for the three hundred soldiers, but it remained his responsibility to recruit the soldiers and procure the gunpowder from neighboring provinces.216 The alcalde mayor of Sololá wrote Aguirre that he could provide him with only forty-five soldiers “who are well trained in using guns” but no gunpowder.217 His remaining twenty-five soldiers, he told Aguirre, “are not at all useful and very old; they are soldiers in name only, and only carry machetes.”218 Prudencio Cozar, head of Quetzaltenango province, responded that if he sent the requested fifty soldiers for the entrada, Aguirre had to agree to pay their salaries. The men would also need to be accompanied by a sergeant, a few corporals, and a drum player (tambor); Aguirre must cover their salaries as well. Cozar, however, claimed to have no gunpowder, however, “not even one grain.”219 He recommended that Aguirre do his best to locate the needed gunpowder because he had found its use “indispensible” during a 1783 Indian uprising in the pueblo of Tactic in Verapaz.220 The entrada expedition planned to gather in Aguacatán and Sacapulas because these towns provided the only access routes to Nebaj. This meant of course that the Indians knew this too, taking away any chance of tactical surprise. The weather proved daunting as well: so much rain had fallen recently that the soldiers would have to travel on foot because it was too muddy to bring horses or mules to carry men and supplies. By June 18, five months after the event, Aguirre’s military force included one hundred militiamen with an additional twenty-four soldiers from the Compañía de Chinautla, a veteran group experienced in working with the antityphus medical campaigns. He sent the Chinautla soldiers to block the two roads into and out of Nebaj.221 So much time had passed that the Audiencia counseled restraint, reminding Aguirre that things in the town were now tranquilo (calm).222 Aguirre persisted. He began the Nebaj entrada by issuing a mandamiento, a colonial legal document sent to the town’s Indian alcaldes, justices, and principales, ordering them to respond in writing within three days and explain the recent antityphus conflicts. While details of further events remain obscure, a letter dated October 12, 1798, stated that “many” of the leaders

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of the Nebaj uprising had died (though it is unclear from what—typhus or other violence) and that the twenty men and women imprisoned for their role in the uprising had broken out of jail and escaped, including the ringleaders, “Domingo Chaves and three of the women.”223 The colonial state attempted to remake and transform broad swaths of Mesoamerican medical-ritual landscapes and cultures, using epidemic outbreaks as the opportunity to do so. Methods included militarized campaigns to root out and shut down access to adoratorios, destroy temascales, move cemeteries, and burn homes and belongings of the epidemic dead. In many ways, what these conflicts bring to light is the limitation of colonial political and religious authority and power in indigenous communities, which became particularly apparent in times of epidemic stress. The tenuous grasp of control in highland communities worried colonial authorities that a regional, multitown rebellion would occur. We can also read the multiple resistances against the medical campaigns in Nebaj, Todos Santos Cuchumatán, and among the “Lacandones” as pushing back against colonial medicine, providing evidence to challenge the canonical narratives of success and the language of humanitarianism that sustained colonial medical and scientific discourses of discovery and treatment at the time. In the case of typhus, what superficially looked like colonial medicine’s inability to develop an effective typhus treatment instead reveals the ways that both colonial and Mesoamerican medical cultures treated the disease using their long-standing and extensive knowledge of medicinal plants and bloodletting therapies, as well as continued references to the humoral paradigm as an explanatory framework for disease, even as medical cultures began to modernize.

chapter three

Constructing Colonial Fetuses

One afternoon in early January 1797, Maya magistrates acting as a community policing force came across a woman’s corpse while patrolling along the top slope of the La Pamilla ravine, located along the royal road near the town of Pinula.1 One of the men then traveled to nearby Nueva Guatemala to notify Cristobal Silvero de Gálvez, the Spanish alcalde in charge of criminal cases in that area, of the discovery. Gálvez and his assistant set out that same day for the ravine and located the woman’s body, which they found lying facedown. In the falling darkness, the men hurried through a preliminary examination of the body. They believed that the woman was likely Maya because of her indigenous-style clothing. On further examination, they noted a bulge or swelling in her uterus.2 Gálvez had the body transported back to the capital and placed it overnight in a city government office that functioned as a makeshift morgue for this case of suspected homicide. The next morning, the surgeon Francisco Zuñiga conducted an autopsy on the woman’s body to determine the cause of death. He found blood in her throat and mouth and scraping wounds on her arms, wrists, and hands. Zuñiga also documented “much bloody material” on the dead woman’s legs and in her vagina.3 Along with the swelling of the uterus, this indicated in his opinion that the woman had recently given birth or had died during childbirth. Zuñiga then conducted a postmortem cesarean, but did not find a feto, or fetus, in the womb; only “much putrefaction.”4 After Zuñiga finished his work, the alcalde turned the woman’s body over to the parish priest of Los Remedios for immediate burial.5 The authorities did not determine 96

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a definitive cause for the woman’s death, nor does the record show that they identified her. A few years later, the Gazeta de Guatemala, the Audiencia’s newspaper published in the capital, reported on a series of postmortem cesareans that took place during 1799 and 1800 in the presidio and mission towns located along Lake Petén Itzá to the north and east of the capital. Among the cesareans was one that occurred at the San Andrés mission when Nicolasa Chatá, a married pregnant woman described as Indian, perished during a devastating smallpox epidemic sweeping through the region.6 One hundred years before, this area was the site of the conquest of the Itzá Maya, the last independent Maya kingdom. Though Spanish-led forces managed to militarily defeat the Itzá, throughout the eighteenth century the region remained a frontier zone, with a presidio and a series of mission towns populated primarily by Itzá and Kowoj Maya.7 As Chatá neared death from smallpox, the parish priest ordered an unnamed Indian barber to prepare to carry out a postmortem cesarean on the pregnant woman. The barber gathered the medical instruments he needed next to Chatá’s deathbed, and at the moment of her death surgically opened Chatá’s uterus under the priest’s supervision and extracted a fetus. The priest then baptized it after he judged “with certainty” that it was alive. It quickly died, however, and was buried together with Chatá in consecrated ground.8 These two incidents, which were neither spectacular nor elicited any special interest at the time, introduce the everyday social practices that gave meaning to the fetus in colonial Guatemala and how medicine and religion began to reframe those meanings in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1785, the Audiencia of Guatemala issued an edict that mandated postmortem cesareans for all deceased pregnant women and for those suspected of pregnancy. This edict formed part of the relatively new project of the colonial state’s intervention into the health of subject populations that also included medical campaigns to control epidemic disease. As with antismallpox campaigns that introduced Guatemala to the diagnostic and therapeutic tools of inoculation starting in 1780, postmortem cesarean mandates also incorporated new surgical techniques and therapies as part of burgeoning state- directed public health efforts there. Colonial and university medical policies and practices absorbed these new tools, which were then incorporated and spread through the Audiencia by practicing medical professionals, paraprofessionals, priests, and others who were expected to perform the cesareans. The category of fetus as a colonial subject was dependent not only on developments in eighteenth-century medicine, but just as importantly, on

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an ideological shift that reflected a change in the way governance conceptualized the “public good” as related to the health of its colonial subjects. Through cases such as those described above, fetuses became officially recognized as colonial subjects in Spanish America, constructed as such through a conjunction of medical, religious, and political processes. This emerging interest stemmed from Guatemala’s urge to claim its place among other Enlightened and modern nations as well as from local concerns and necessities of colonial gender and racial politics. The practice of postmortem cesareans on deceased female bodies was intended to serve the larger goal of maintaining and propagating an empire managed by ruling elites that began to take health-related policies into their own hands. These elites worked to devise and enact the campaigns with the goal of ensuring the health of the Audiencia’s colonial populations, which came, by the end of the eighteenth century, to include fetuses as well.9 The impetus for these policies emerged not from the Spanish imperial center but from members of the Guatemalan elite, as did the first smallpox inoculations there. This is why, some twenty years before King Charles IV of Spain enacted a royal order mandating the postmortem procedure in all of Spain’s dominions, the Audiencia already had such a law. Ideologically, the fetal status placed them in a special category that superseded the other traditional markers of colonial identity such as race, ethnicity, and slave-free status that ordered the mundane colonial world. Guatemalan elites appropriated the responsibility of giving all fetuses, regardless of what other colonial categories they fit into, a fetal baptism in cases in which the woman, for whatever reason, could not carry the fetus to term. In the process, a woman’s uterus became at once a political, religious, and medicalized space apart from the female subject, and as such an independent object of surveillance and surgical intervention by a parish priest and an Indian barber (as in the case of Chatá), by colonial police and local surgeons (as in the case of the murdered Indian woman), and other professional men in colonial society. Through these conflicts surrounding fetuses and wombs, we can analyze what Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp have characterized as “local reproductive relations as constituted by and resistant to more global forms of power.”10

Humanitarian Postmortem Cesareans First, a word about the vocabulary used in the sources relating to fetuses. The term “feto,” translated here as “fetus,” is used frequently in colonial-era documents related to postmortem cesareans and also in referring to a

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nascent human located in the uterus in other types of sources. The formal definition of feto, according the Diccionario de Real Academia Española is “that which a woman, or any kind of female animal, has conceived and has in her womb.”11 But while this definition of feto signifies location in the womb, colonial legal sources, court testimonies, postmortem cesarean manuals, newspaper articles, medical guides, and other documents show the blurring of that inside- outside boundary—the “fetus” could also be located outside the womb through natural childbirth, miscarriage, or surgical extraction via the postmortem cesarean. The other term frequently used is “criatura.” Today this means “child” or “infant.” However, in the eighteenth century, the Diccionario defined “criatura” as “a child recently born, or soon after [birth], and also the fetus before being born.”12 Thus, the term “criatura” also has the dual aspect of location in the womb or recently born or extracted from it. Sources show that inhabitants of colonial Guatemala used the term this way as well. Because of this ambiguity, in my analysis I have had to define fetal location inside or outside the womb through context. I also note that in contemporary abortion debates terms like child and mother are fraught with political overtones. I have been careful to use the specific language employed in the sources to refer to fetuses and women in my analysis because these terms were also politicized in similar and different ways in the eighteenth century. During the 1780s, elites in Guatemala introduced measures that gave fetuses status as colonial subjects. In 1785, political, religious, and medical officials began to promote the cesarean procedure immediately upon the death of a pregnant woman. As they did so, they developed an ideology to support their practice, articulated in religious and medical handbooks and guidelines and distributed across colonial Central America. In October of that year, the president of the Audiencia of Guatemala, José de Estachería, circulated a judicial decree mandating postmortem cesareans throughout the region.13 Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy followed soon after with an edict of his own in December 1785, ordering the excommunication of the pregnant woman’s family and any others involved if a postmortem cesarean was not carried out immediately.14 Much of what little research that has been published on postmortem cesareans in colonial Spanish America locates the starting point of this history in King Charles IV’s 1804 royal order, which was sent to all areas of Spanish America, including the Audiencia of Guatemala. This order mandated conducting cesareans on all deceased pregnant women at the immediate time of their death because “the spiritual and temporal life of las criaturas (fetuses located inside the uterus) is an object of the utmost

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importance.”15 Adam Warren’s work for the colonial Andes is an exception to this historiographic trend, as he found that surgeons conducted postmortem cesareans in Lima beginning in the 1770s. Warren argues that Peruvian cesareans offer important examples of the role of religion in medicine during the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century, making visible the “religious reclaiming of medical expertise.”16 In contrast, the Guatemalan case shows how colonial elites linked the justification and spread of the procedure to eighteenth-century notions of humanitarianism, Enlightened modernity, and religion, creating the fetus as a kind of colonial subject, not only religiously but also politically and medically. One of the great motives behind Guatemala’s 1785 directive rested on a desire for Guatemala to enter the ranks of “modern” nations by using the tools of the new sciences to benefit the colony’s population. The colonial state, composed of Audiencia officials, in conjunction with regional and local elites, adapted the Enlightenment notion of the state’s humanitarian duty to its colonial populations. These same Guatemalan notions of modernity and humanitarianism can be seen in the first antismallpox campaigns using inoculation that took place there in 1780 and continued to develop and adapt over the course of the late colonial public health campaigns as explicit concern for fetuses and directives mandating postmortem cesareans became part of official cure books for measles, typhus, and starting in 1804, the introduction of the smallpox vaccine to colonial Central America. For example, the 1785 postmortem cesarean medical instructions contained a section on the lifedeath signs observed in typhus-afflicted pregnant women and physical tests to ensure that death had in fact occurred, so that the cesarean could be conducted as soon as they died.17 Protomedicato-authored typhus curebooks written in the 1790s included directives that medical, political, and religious officials ministering to infected towns should be on the lookout for pregnant women dying of the disease so a postmortem cesarean could be performed.18 President Estachería’s 1785 decree reflected the desire of Guatemala’s elite not only to proceed correctly on traditional political and religious grounds but also to stand with other “modern” nations: “The cesarean procedure, which removes the fetus (feto) from dead women with an incision, is established in this Kingdom [of Guatemala] not only because of its humanitarian and religious uses, but also because it is recommended by all the political rights (derechos) observed in all the political nations.”19 The president’s legal mandate for the medical procedure set in motion a train of events leading to its standardization.20 In 1788, Pedro Mariano

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Iturbide penned one of two postmortem cesarean manuals published in the Audiencia during that decade. He, too, prefaced his technical discussion of the procedure with the argument that the practice would allow Guatemala to take its place among the world’s important capitals, writing that “one sees that almost all of the rest [of the capitals] practice the cesarean procedure, and it is time to do it in the capital [of the Audiencia of Guatemala].”21 While the practice may not have really been sanctioned “in all political nations,” as asserted by Iturbide, surely he captured something of the spirit of the discussion that was being carried out in Europe. In 1745, Francesco Cangiamila, a friar posted in Sicily at the time, published his work Sacred Embryology, which became an enormously influential theologicogynecological treatise.22 Pope Benedict IV and Charles III, then king of Naples and Sicily and future king of Spain, both supported his work. Cangiamila cited the importance of postmortem cesareans for what he characterized as the spiritual salvation of children on the basis of his pastoral experiences in Sicily. His goal was to transform the procedure, which many saw as “abhorrent,” into a widely accepted practice.23 In Sicily, his suggestion was made into law in 1749, and between 1760 and 1762 some 225 cesareans were performed there.24 Because of this official notice, the book soon came to have a wide-ranging influence in colonial Latin America, including Guatemala.25 Around the same time, in 1742, the theological scholar and Cistercian priest Antonio José Rodríguez published on the importance of postmortem cesareans in the first of what eventually became the four-volume New Aspects on Medical-Moral Theology.26 Rodríguez was an impor tant figure among the eighteenth-century Spanish authors who focused on medicine.27 He also was one of the authors who argued that fetal animation began at conception, basing his assertion on both religious obligations and evidence provided by Enlightenment science: “By the moment the egg is fertilised, and moves, the rational Soul must enter for, as its true form, it lavishes its faculties on all other functions.”28 Both Cangiamila and Rodríguez’s works circulated in the Americas by at least the 1770s, and both authors are cited in Guatemalan sources as influential.29 After the Audiencia published its edict in 1785, two works written by priests living and working in Guatemala instructed other priests and lay people on the secular and religious laws mandating postmortem cesareans. The first, published in 1786, was Pedro de Arrese’s Physical, Canonical, and Moral Principles . . . Regarding the Baptism of Miscarried Fetuses and [the] Cesarean Operation in Those Who Die While Pregnant.30 Iturbide’s Brief

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and Small Compendium of the Obligation to Baptize Fetuses followed in 1788.31 Both Arrese and Iturbide relied heavily on Cangiamila and Rodríguez in making their own arguments, modifying their advice when needed to apply it specifically to Guatemala’s spiritual and policy needs and to its different cultural mix. In conjunction with the decree mandating the cesareans, President Estachería commissioned medical doctors at the University of San Carlos to write the official Instructions detailing how to conduct the procedure and to adapt it to local conditions, including targeting nonprofessionals who might be performing it in indigenous communities and in rural areas.32 In 1786, these instructions, bundled with the postmortem cesarean mandate, were sent to officials throughout Central America.33 Estachería intended the Instructions to be used by nonmedical specialists, such as the priest and the barber who were on hand for Chatá’s death, as the goal was to provide “a succinct Instruction, methodical and clear, of how to carry out the said [cesarean] procedure so that finally in all the Provinces of [Central America] one can follow the instructions without the need for profesores (medical physicians and surgeons with university medical degrees).”34 The Instructions recommended urgency after the death of a pregnant woman because the authors recognized that the window of time was short: the priest or family must get “the surgeon, barber, or someone else” to come quickly to perform the cesarean to increase the chance of a live fetal extraction, a status critical to fetal baptism.35 The authors also pitched parts of their advice to unlicensed or informally trained doctors, using plain language that would be understandable to experts and lay persons alike, especially for readers outside of the capital: “In the case of necessity,” the authors assure the reader, “when no expert [can be found], [and] it must be conducted with one’s own hands, we promise total success.”36 The instructions defined four types of fetuses: those located in the womb, those “born from the dead,” miscarried fetuses (abortivos), and monsters (monstruos).37 As each type merited fetal baptism, each called for postmortem cesareans when necessary, in accordance with “the recommendation of His Holiness [Pope] Benedict XIV and that of our King.”38 Other colonial categories, so central to organizing social relations in Central America, did not merit consideration, such as ethnicity, gender, slave-free status, or legitimacy. The cesarean was not a procedure that could be simply learned from a book, however. Rather, practitioners are urged to practice the procedure on pregnant animals—dogs and monkeys—before conducting the

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procedure on pregnant humans: “Barbers and able young men [should first] execute the operation on pregnant dogs or monkeys, which are a little different but have essentially the same organization [as a pregnant woman].”39 The authors also suggest, perhaps a little hopefully given conditions in rural colonial Guatemala, that barbers also prepare themselves by reading Cangiamila’s Sacred Embryology before proceeding.40 These medical instructions show the ways that colonial officials, when designing the policy mandating postmortem cesareans, consciously situated its implementation in local, regional, and transatlantic processes. The medical instructions, for example, referred to the king of Spain and the Pope’s support for the procedure, while at the same time taking it for granted that many of those who would read their text would have limited or no training in formal medicine and be operating in rural indigenous Maya communities. They knew that rural health care depended on this corps of experienced paraprofessionals.41 The material culture of Guatemalan life, however, did merit consideration. The physician-authored Instructions make explicit reference to the Guatemalan context. For instance, they recommended that the woman’s body be placed on a petate, an indigenous- style woven mat commonly found in Mesoamerica, to perform the cesarean. This detail indicates that the physicians anticipated that the procedure might be performed in modest homes in primarily indigenous populated rural areas. The manual also alerted the medical practitioner to watch out for family members who brought a dead woman of childbearing age from a rural milpa (a Mesoamerican-style plot of agricultural land) for burial in town to examine her body to determine whether or not she died while pregnant. Responsibility for delivering the fetus from the dead woman and baptizing it fell not only on religious officials and the Church, but also local and regional political authorities, university-trained physicians, tributary Indian political office holders, and informal medical personnel at the village level (the barber, midwife, etc.). Every link in the chain displays a double aspect of complicity and enlightenment—complicit in the creation of a colonial state powerful enough to intervene in the most intimate affairs of its subject, and enlightened enough to take part in the project of modernizing the Guatemalan patria (as elites characterized their Audiencia) using medically advanced means to extend humanitarian aid to the fetus. The “state” in this context then was not the imperial state but the collective work of local and regional elites and their agents, and it was made up of political, religious, and medical components.

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Postmortem cesarean policies were embedded in local concerns but also gained their larger meaning with reference to other important colonial factors: outbreaks of epidemic diseases such as smallpox and typhus, the continuing efforts of religious conversion of indigenous populations, lack of qualified surgeons outside city centers, the role of midwives and other female curers in pregnancy and childbirth, and protective family members and neighbors that shaped both the ideology and practice of postmortem cesareans in Guatemala. Thus, while Guatemalan elites viewed their support of postmortem cesareans as evidence of Enlightened modernity and humanitarianism, their implementation rested firmly on colonial processes. Through the promulgation of laws mandating postmortem cesareans in Guatemala in the eighteenth century, the fetus was transformed into a kind of colonial subject that had to be “delivered”—transferred from the inside to the exterior—to ensure its physical and moral health. The laws couched the procedure in language that spoke of saving the fetus from an “inhumane” death in the dead woman’s uterus by removing it to ensure its baptism, even though the fetus died in most of the recorded cases. The postmortem cesarean was the face of a larger process of how colonial medicine, in conjunction with religion, reconfigured the category of “human” in the late eighteenth century. This transformation has significant implications: the change in the status of the fetus to animated (biologically alive and ensouled) created the need of saving medically (from smothering to death in the womb) and religiously (through baptizing the fetal soul).

The Fetus in Mesoamerican and Colonial Cultures What of Mesoamerican conceptualizations of the fetus during the colonial period? Extant sources provide only brief and partial glimpses of this complicated issue. One way Mesoamerican ideas about the fetus came into the historical record was through depictions of magical violence and assault in community conflicts that portrayed exceptional women and men as having the power to shape-shift—to transform their own bodies and the bodies of others into animals and natural objects. Mesoamerican shape-shifting practices have been labeled “nagualismo” in the ethnographic and ethnohistorical literature, and though local variations have been noted, shapeshifting ability has generally been attributed to the most successful and feared ritual specialists.42 Colonial-era Mesoamerican shape-shifting across

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human-animal boundaries reflected and shaped cultural understandings of human reproduction and fetal development. Here I combine case studies of shape-shifting that used ritual violence as an explanatory framework to understand pregnancy disruptions, transformations of reproductive organs, as well as fetuses in utero. Such shape- shifting accounts and their relation to local conflicts can be used as a point of entry from which to view and analyze the range of representational and interpretive issues surrounding the Mesoamerican conceptions of reproduction and the fetus in colonial society, showing the operation of flexible and unstable binaries of fetus-human, human- animal, and life- death at play in colonial Central America. Malevolent sorcerers who were also shape- shifters could cast illnesses that caused temporary or permanent damage to human reproductive organs that limited or halted that person’s ability to procreate. In 1705, Pedro Cogito came to the attention of colonial authorities during an extended investigation into Chinautla’s reputation as a haven for Indian sorcerers and spell-casters.43 Cogito, called by witnesses a great sorcerer (grande hechisero), was well-known for his supernatural abilities.44 Cogito also had an established reputation for casting illness on reproductive organs. Parish priest Tomás de San Diego y Arrevillaga reported that Cogito approached an unnamed Indian woman for sexual relations and she refused. In retaliation, he “put a monstrous swelling on her venereal parts, so that she moved and jumped like a toad. Other Indian women saw that this happened, and I have heard [them] speak of the event with admiration.” 45 Here, Cogito shape-shifted a woman’s genitalia in a way that caused her to act like a toad. Both Mesoamerican and European cultures associated toads with sorcery. Cogito’s case was one of many that came to light during the extended antisorcery and divination campaign in Chinautla that referenced toads. Images of toads, considered to have supernatural power, were later burned by Arrevillaga in a public ceremony in the town’s plaza alongside other confiscated ritual items.46 Both Mesoamerican and European cultures associate toads (sapos) and frogs (ranas) with sorcery and the supernatural. In Maya cultures, these animals “are metaphors for regeneration, because they shed their old skin and look fresh and new.”47 Toads also featured prominently in another account of malevolent sorcery of shape- shifted sexual organs. Francisca González, a single thirtyseven year old mulata living in the capital, recounted that ritual specialist Gerónima Varaona treated a woman named María la Soltera for a supernatural illness that caused her “lower parts” to swell greatly, turning her thighs black and mangy “like the skin of a toad.”48 Sorcerers not only

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shape-shifted women’s genitalia to damage it, they supernaturally attacked men as well. In 1695, a mulata woman named Manuela from the barrio of Santo Domingo in the capital denounced the mestiza Francisca de Gálvez for “doing evil” to her, causing sickness and pain in her “natural parts.”49 Manuela died from the illness. Around the same time, Gálvez also cast an illness on a man that “wrecked his natural parts,” the act taking place, according to witnesses, as she entered his shop one night in the shapeshifted form of a jaguar.50 Witnesses testified to Gálvez’s reputation as a shape- shifter with the ability to transform into a jaguar, an animal whose symbolic significance representing kingship, warfare, and the most powerful ritual specialists in Mesoamerican cultures has been well established.51 The link between supernatural transformation as a sign of ritual power to cast illness extended to the fetus. Malevolent sorcery descriptions of pregnancy interference—shape-shifting fetuses in utero to cause miscarriage or to subvert the pregnancy and cause the birth of animals or hybrid humananimals from human women—convey representations in the colonial period of the fetus as shape- shifter, capable of transformation within a continuum of beings: human, animal, and hybrid human-animal. This evidence reveals a broader discussion of reproductive and fetal illness and deformity not only in community social relations but also within colonial institutions of power—the Church, Inquisition and criminal courts, the Protomedicato, and the political realms from the royal Audiencia authorities to the Indian cabildo (town government). In 1660, Andrés García, a tributary Kaqchikel Maya from Pinula, accused Marta de la Figueroa to the town’s Indian justices of casting a supernatural illness on his pregnant wife Catalina Gómez.52 García complained that Figueroa, a married Kaqchikel Maya midwife, had bullied his wife in an effort to treat her during her pregnancy. From that point on, his wife’s abdomen and uterus swelled, and she expelled worms from her vagina.53 The worms here acted as both a symptom of her illness and evidence of the malevolent sorcery used to intervene in her pregnancy, perhaps changing the fetus into worms or creating a worm-filled womb that would be uninhabitable for the fetus.54 Snakes, with forms similar to worms, also acted as sorcery agents in shapeshifting fetuses, as described in Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán’s colonial history Recordación Florida.55 Fuentes y Guzmán wrote an account of an Indian pueblo whose residents refused to convert to Christianity. A Franciscan priest ministering to the community characterized them as cannibals “who cooked and ate their children,” and the priest threatened that if they did it again, they would be “punished by heaven” and turned

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into snakes, “who would break their entrails into pieces.” One Indian woman in par ticular ignored him and supposedly cooked and ate her infant. That same night, she began to feel extremely harsh pain in her womb which moved, coiled and uncoiled as a snake did. These sensations passed from her womb to her muscles, and from there returned to her womb, [then] to the stomach and arms. And remaining tormented in that way, with pains as if [she were] in labor, she began to give birth to deformed snakes, and with the fear and torments she suffered, she died still expelling the vermin from her body.56

The snakes here reference the book of Genesis and seventeenth-century European antiheresy rhetoric in which Protestants and Catholics insulted each other with references to snakes and other animals of biblical significance.57 In colonial Maya cultures, snakes had a strong association with ritual divination as portents. Among the colonial Achi’ Maya, women dream of snakes when they have become pregnant.58 Adding another layer to the interpretation of the birth of snakes is that Fuentes y Guzmán depicted the event as a kind of illness, calling it “cumatz,” the K’iche’ Maya word for snake.59 Epidemics in the colonial period were well-known for causing spontaneous miscarriages in pregnant women. Toads, which had a strong association with shape-shifting and casting illness on reproductive organs, also proved a key theme in shape-shifted fetuses. One account of a toad-like fetal shape-shifting comes from an Inquisition source from the 1730s in Santiago de Guatemala.60 When Doña María Cecilia Paniagua was five months pregnant, she became involved in a conflict with the mestiza sorcerer María Savina. Paniagua said that from then on through the rest of her pregnancy, every night from dusk until dawn she heard a toad croaking. The sound followed her even when she changed rooms.61 At the end of her pregnancy, Paniagua described giving birth to a “dead monster,” the top half of its body shaped like a toad’s, with a toad-like head and long arms that reached almost to its feet. The bottomhalf of the body appeared human, with very rough skin like a toad’s. Paniagua found the blood and afterbirth “not like natural blood, but muddy like mud from a lake,” a toad’s natural environment.62 When the Dominican priest Tomás Serrano, present at the birth for the baptism, viewed the deformed fetal body, he declared its transformation the result of sorcery. He used the language of infection—calling it a “supernatural infection”—further indicating a strong suspicion of supernatural fetal

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transformation.63 Serrano was not an exceptional priest to judge a deformed birth to be a “monster.” Religious handbooks in Guatemala and elsewhere in colonial Latin America contained guidelines on whether and in what way to baptize in the case of miscarriages and still births, including Francisco Sunzin de Herrera’s Practical-Moral Handbook in Which it is Asked if Miscarried Fetuses Can be Baptized, published in Guatemala in 1756: “It is not against the custom of the Church nor against [its practices] to baptize fetuses (fetos) if they live; if it is alive, baptize. Nor is it [against the custom of the Church] to baptize monstrous births whose [human] nature (naturaleza) is in doubt.”64 What is important here is to baptize a deformed, miscarried fetus if it is judged to be alive, whether or not the attending priests believe the fetus to be human or not. What if a fetus looked like an animal naturally, that is, without some type of supernatural intervention? Is it human? Some Enlightenment-era priests working in colonial Guatemala compared fetuses in early stages of development to various animals, describing them as having worm or insectlike appearances. Iturbide, the friar at the Colegio de Cristo Crucificado, compared the fetus at an early state of development to an ant: “One must carefully inspect what resulted from the miscarriage (mal parto), [and] even if [the fetus] is no bigger than a barley grain, or [even if it] looks like an ant, [it must be baptized].”65 Arrese included a section in his postmortem cesarean handbook designed to allow a priest, surgeon, or whoever performed the cesarean to recognize the fetus at an early stage of development by comparing its shape to a worm: “In fact by the third day [after conception], one sees that [the fetus] is like a little worm with a head, and with the help of a microscope, one can see the distinctive features of the human body. It appears to be a worm, but it is human.”66 On the one hand, scientific and religious thought at the time saw the fetus in utero as in need of special protection from, among other things, abortifacients and pregnant women performing physical acts thought to promote miscarriage. On the other hand, some priests and medical doctors saw the fetus as acting in “super” human ways, as can be found in the same Guatemalan postmortem cesarean manuals authored by Iturbide and Arrese. Part of the religious justification for the procedure rested on the medical and religious assertion that a fetus could live on for days or even weeks in a deceased maternal womb, making postmortem cesareans critical to ensuring the fetal soul received the rite of baptism.67 This extraordinary ability to survive inside a womb after maternal death is depicted as a kind of special fetal power. This is also the case in Mesoamerican cultures. Janis Alcorn notes that in Huasteca Maya cultures, the fetus is portrayed as a soul-stealer, robbing

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the soul from someone who is dying so that the fetus can develop and be born. Sometimes, however, a fetus will steal a person’s soul before their time to die. Community members labeled these fetal soul- stealers still in the womb brujos (witches) and considered them dangerous.68 Such representations of extraordinary fetuses that included soul stealing and transformations in utero, together with descriptions of its ability to survive inside a womb after maternal death as a special fetal power that justified postmortem cesareans, show the fetus as not bound by human-animal categories of difference but instead transitioning between them, and even at times, acting “super” human. While the anxiety about the fetus in eighteenth-century Guatemala was new, newborns (recien nacidos) and pregnant women had long been considered critical colonial subjects, playing a central role in campaigns of religious conversion since the conquest era. The baptism of the newborn was a ritual of social and ideological control that not only linked the infant to God, but also linked the infant and the parents to the institution of the Church and to the Spanish colonial empire of which the Church was a pillar. The policy of postmortem cesareans followed in the wake left by the earlier agenda of policing pregnant women and parents over the baptism of newborns, with similar attempts by the Church (and by inference the state) to intercede in the colonial population’s reproductive lives. Many native peoples, in turn, chose to resist in various ways—negligence, hiding, or following Mesoamerican birth rituals in secret.69 Archbishop Cortés y Larraz, during his Audiencia-wide inspection from 1769 to 1770, alerted parish priests that because of persistent tactics of baptism delay and avoidance, they needed to pay attention to pregnant women in their community, laying the practical and ideological groundwork justifying such surveillance to ensure postmortem cesareans: “Also, since then I ordered that the baptism of children not be delayed; they must be baptized within three days [of their birth]. If not, the justices will imprison the parents and even punish them, well and swiftly. And women who are pregnant must confess [to the parish priest] when they are close to giving birth.”70 Cortés y Larraz considered Zumpango parish a particular region of concern in this regard, where alternatives to Christian baptism and possible postpartum healing rituals came to the attention of the parish priest: Two times he [the parish priest] saw that before [the Indians] presented their infants for baptism, without taking any precaution, they took the infant to the forest to offer it [to a being] to whom they appealed, according to their customs. And [in] the said woods, on a towering hill located in the area immediately next to the pueblo on the eastern side, the area

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is identified by a stone table or bench and some copales (copal incense and/or its burnt remains).71

The Church sought access to newborns while the Maya sought to maintain their privileged position in deciding the forms and times of initiating the infant into the community and its religious life. Additionally, Cortés y Larraz’s account reveals what appear to be competing or parallel birth traditions that continued in Maya communities alongside or in place of Christian rituals. The focus on fetal animation and postmortem cesareans in the eighteenth century that preoccupied theologians in Guatemala and elsewhere in New Spain in part emerged from the rebirth of a lively debate, pursued over multiple domains of knowledge, about the beginning of life and its implications for fetuses. In response to both changes in the technology of obstetrics and in the secular medical thematic of life as a mechanical process conducted in philosophical circles, Sunzin de Herrera, a member of the Augustinian order and a doctor of theology working in Guatemala, concentrated on establishing two main points in this work Practical-Moral Consultation in Which it is Asked Whether Miscarried Fetuses Should be Baptized. First, he argued that animation begins at conception. Sunzin’s contention reflected the larger shift by medical and theological writers such as Rodríguez against the older tradition stemming from Aristotle, whose thesis on fetal development had been revived in the first half of the eighteenth century, that life began forty days after conception for males and eighty days after conception for females. Second, Sunzin posited that all miscarried fetuses (fetos abortivos), at whatever stage of development, must be baptized, either unconditionally if the fetus is judged to be alive, or conditionally, if there are no signs of life.72 The Christian religious argument that animation began at conception— that is, that the fetus was biologically alive and possessed a soul—reemerged in tandem with research on embryology and the use of microscopes, which helped solve certain puzzles in fetal development. Scientists like Albrecht Haller and Joseph Needham began to develop anatomically sophisticated ways of identifying and tracking stages of fetal development. The arguments between different parties in the eighteenth century—the vitalists, the preformationists, the mechanical school—agreed, at least, on the succession of features, and in the process taking them to reveal the humanity of the fetus. In the Encyclopedie, under the entry for “animation,” a discussion of the scientific state of the art in embryology ends with considerations of the fact that if one does not recognize the soul belonging to

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an embryo, it could seem like a justification for abortion, denying the state a citizen-soul. Thus, even in European circles in which religion was subject to thorough criticism, the discussion about the soul of the embryo fell back onto arguments for believing that animation began at conception.73 Scientific, political, and religious understandings of animation were interrelated in a passage in Iturbide’s cesarean handbook where he argued that the microscope showed animation by revealing the fetus’s physical humanity: it “can be seen under a microscope [that it] has a human shape.”74 The implications of the development of the fetus as bio-religious category in the eighteenth century was to dissolve the previously dominant binary of the interior and the exterior of the female body that had assigned to the fetus in the womb a separate status from the newborn. Both now became characterized as ensouled and in need of baptism, and as colonial subjects, targets of colonial evangelization policies. This reworking of the fetus allows for the seemingly contradictory argument made by Guatemalan elites in the eighteenth century that postmortem cesareans can be considered “modern” and “humanitarian.” The recategorization of fetal status was firmly in place at the time of the 1804 Spanish royal order mandating postmortem cesareans, which argued for the extraction of the fetus after maternal death because “the spiritual and temporal life of las criaturas (those remaining in the womb and born or surgically extracted from it) is an object of the utmost importance.”75 The promotion of these ideological changes related to fetuses and reproduction were not confined to esoteric religious and scientific writings on the topic, but came to be practically important when embryology, fetal development, female reproductive anatomy, and surgery came together as elements of Guatemala’s public health policies. Books, pamphlets, and newspapers published on these topics and were circulated widely among the Audiencia’s reading public, spreading religiously influenced science education. Iturbide and Arrese, the authors of the Guatemalan cesarean manuals, tried to make the distinction between the feto and the womb’s other biological material as clear as possible to the reader who was often not a medical professional. Both manuals included explicit instructions on how to discern the difference between a “true embryo” (verdadero embrión) from what they called “a fleshy lump” (una mola carnosa) and liquid in the uterus that had coagulated or congealed (un cuajarón de sangre).76 Colonial officials clearly worried that barbers and others performed cesareans with only minimal formal training, and that they might mistakenly extract extraneous biological matter from the womb and baptize it instead of the fetus. So they turned to the newspaper to help circulate information

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about this to the general reading public. In 1799, the Gazeta de Guatemala published an article titled “Warning to the Public,” which notified its readers that it had proof that some priests and others without any formal medical training who conducted postmortem cesareans had, in error, either baptized biological matter extracted from the womb or the matter expelled after a miscarriage, mistaking it for the fetus.77 The author noted that in Guatemala the term “congelo” (frozen or congealed) was often used to describe this biological material. By failing to identify the fetus, the priest did not direct the baptismal water upon its head, causing it “to irredeemably lose its eternal health,” with the implication that health and salvation were inextricably bound up with one another. Instead, the author assured the readers, the mola carnosa or congelo acted only as a protective shell and needed to be removed to reveal the feto for baptism: “with quickness and cleverness, carefully open that fleshiness (carnosidad); he will encounter the fetus at the center, more or less perfect[ly formed], according to how long it has been developing, and the baptismal water should be placed on it, so that it remains as saved as possible.”78 The efficacy of baptism occurred through the direct contact of the water with the fetus, as well as with the newborn. Unknowingly letting the fleshy shell remain around the fetus would thus deprive it of its rightful due as a Christian colonial subject. The author furthermore advocated the need for fetal baptism in every case of miscarriage because determining whether the feto moved, breathed, and was medically alive was subordinate to the fact that animation began at conception: “One must not stop to see if the feto is animated or not, because it is the opinion that bodies (cuerpos) become animated from the first instant of conception, and today this is widely approved by the authorities (autoridades) and by reason (razones).”79 So the idea that animation began at conception was popularized and spread not only via cesarean operation manuals, but also in print media read by Guatemala’s literate public. Along with identifying fetal animation with conception on both religious and biological grounds, the theological and medical discourse dwelt on the idea that the fetus could live in the womb for hours and even days after a woman’s death, trapped in a kind of “prison.”80 This rhetoric of the uterus as a dangerous place for the fetus played up fears that if a woman who died while pregnant was buried, the fetus, in effect, was being buried alive, dying an inhumane death. Authors of treatises on embryology wrote with conviction that this happened frequently, a theme that also pops up in the cesarean manuals published in Guatemala. As Iturbide notes, “by means of these observations and doctrines in favor of animation from conception, . . .

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at whatever point in her pregnancy the woman dies, the fetus must be extracted from the womb, [and] baptized, to not bury it alive with its dead mother (madre) which frequently happens.”81 The imagery of entombment brought a sense of urgency to the support of postmortem cesareans to extract and baptize fetuses that remained in a dead woman’s womb. Colonial officials in Guatemala utilized statistics and compelling anecdotes to persuade the public of the likelihood of fetal survival in the womb after the death of pregnant women.82 In May 1799, the Gazeta de Guatemala published an article titled “New Cases of Conscience.” This article cited Cangiamila and the statistics he presented in his Sacred Embryology in support of fetal survival in the womb: for every one hundred fetuses “enclosed” in the wombs of dead women, sixty survived “for at least twelve hours,” and others survived there for “three or four days.”83 Iturbide takes up this theme when he described a postmortem cesarean that took place two days after the death of a pregnant woman from being struck by lightning. He noted that even though two days was a long time to elapse before the cesarean was performed, nevertheless the practitioner extracted a live fetus.84 By circulating such descriptions of fetal terror and rescue, government officials and their religious supporters infused a sense of urgency into the colonial effort to surgically intervene into women’s wombs on the basis of religious, medical, and humanitarian grounds. The imagery here is impor tant: metaphors of entombment or of the uterus as a jail cell, and descriptions of fetal rescue, run through the Guatemalan cesarean manuals. They characterize the fetus in utero as frantically moving to aid in its “escape” from the womb as part of the birth process: “The child (el niño) becomes agitated and makes the effort to leave his prison (prisión), and in this way breaks the membranes that are wrapped around it.”85 The medical Instructions penned by Guatemala’s top doctors utilize the same metaphor: “We must perform [the postmortem cesarean] for a child (un niño) whose mother (madre) is dead, and who finds himself completely destitute without her, enclosed in a jail that with such ease we could [surgically] open.”86 The language in this image of fetal entrapment in the uterus, and the use of the words “child” and “mother,” further underscore how supporters of the procedure ratcheted up the emotional stakes of not performing the cesarean. Protomédico Narciso Esparragosa deployed these and other similar metaphors in his 1798 pamphlet that promoted his invention of a new medical instrument that he called the asa elástica, a kind of flexible forceps to be used in cases of difficult births.87 As the title of the pamphlet indicates, the asa elástica additionally could be used “to extract the [fetal] head that

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remains in the uterus after it has been separated from the body” during a difficult birth. In the opening paragraph of the pamphlet, Esparragosa describes the womb as a biological jail from which the fetus needs to be medically liberated: “When the fetus, in the place of its formation, reaches the stage where its organs have achieved a certain size and solidity of development, it is necessary to free it from the jail (cárcel) of the maternal womb.”88 Thus, by the final decades of the eighteenth century, both women of childbearing age and fetuses became impor tant flashpoints in colonial discourses and practices. Their entrance into a discourse justifying an activist course of action with regard to pregnancy marks a development in the collective colonial Enlightenment policy of reintegrating different social groups into the Spanish colonial project.89 These discourses that framed public health efforts configured the womb as medicalized space, subject to surveillance and surgical intervention. To succeed, the project had to depend on the literate portion of the population who could read, to themselves and to others, the more sophisticated texts put into circulation from policymakers to the population. The Gazeta de Guatemala, in which the articles “New Cases of Conscience” and “Warning to the Public” were published in Guatemala’s capital city, had a readership across colonial Central America, Mexico, and Spain. The newspaper’s frequent reports on medical and health issues, and on surgical innovations in the Americas and Europe, shows that apparently there was a general audience interested in such scientific information in colonial Central America. Guatemala had been a hub of printing activity since the first printing presses were set up there in 1660, and it fed a reading public avid for newspapers, pamphlets, and books from both New World and European authors. As fetal status changed in the eighteenth century, religious, medical, and political writings in support of postmortem cesareans dissolved the autonomy of women over matters of birth and reimagined the pregnant woman as a vessel carrying the uterus, a space that became of public interest and possible intervention. As women lost a degree of control over their pregnancies, they were also made legally responsible for informing their parish priests of their pregnancies. Yet this loss of autonomy was supplemented by the recognition of their new roles as responsible colonial subjects. If a pregnant woman was dying, she was encouraged to confess her pregnancy if she had not already done so, so that the mechanism could be put in place to perform a postmortem cesarean on her body. After the death of a pregnant woman, the priest or family must get “the surgeon (cirujano), barber, or someone else” to perform the cesarean as quickly as possible to increase the chance of a live fetal extraction.90

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These regulations and the apologetics they spawned premised as a subtext a certain characterization of women: they were secretive, able to hide their pregnancy from priests and other colonial officials (often with the support of husbands and family members), and tacitly opposed to giving the state or church access to their uterus. This logic, which had initially set out to mandate postmortem cesareans, quickly evolved into a policy of surveillance. In the cesarean manuals themselves, readers would repeatedly encounter passages advocating the use of coercion (in the form of threats of excommunication and other penalties) on husbands, partners, families, communities, and the women themselves to expose pregnancies.91 This language of coercion can be seen in the decree promulgated by Guatemala’s Audiencia president: “I order that [for] any pregnant woman who dies, even [if she has] only been pregnant for a few days, her relatives or neighbors must immediately notify the surgeon so that the operation can be completed to save the feto with water of the Holy Baptism.”92 Just as Cangiamila, whose work set in motion the policy of mandating postmortem cesareans, encountered fierce resistance from the Sicilian population, so, too, the documents concerning postmortem cesareans imply that the priest and medical officer would encounter resistance for intruding into a moment that was surely among the most tense in the life of a household, all with the intention of surgically opening the dead woman’s body. By laying the responsibility for this task partly on the woman herself, since she had to report her condition to the parish priest, the policy cultivated the collaboration of the population in its own subjection. The delicacy of what is being asked for is underlined by the fact that the manuals often encouraged creating a line of communication between the woman and the priest outside of the official institutional boundaries. According to the medical Instructions, this notification should take place outside of the confessional.93 This detail illuminates a social context in which the opposition of the father, family members, surgeons, barbers, and of the women themselves can easily be imagined. It also implies that women could be successful at hiding their pregnancies from outsiders. As a result, authorities created secular and religious penalties that could be levied against family members in such cases.94 The role of the woman in this discourse, then, is that of an ambiguous subject—a potential collaborator or rebel, a necessary adjunct of the pregnancy and yet not the owner of her uterus. Rather, she is treated as the bearer of the uterus under this decree and in the texts that surround the issue of postmortem cesareans.

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Fetal Politics and Postmortem Cesareans in Daily Life Clues to how postmortem cesarean ideologies and accounts of fetal extraction in religious settings operated in society can be found in secular cesarean and miscarriage accounts from autopsy and criminal court records from the 1780s through the 1790s. These sources indicated that the theoretical concern for fetal health in colonial social relations was more complicated in practice, and elaborate a fetal politics that worked to reinforce the colonial categories of difference that organized and ranked fetuses and the women who attempted to carry them to term.95 In particular, there existed a particular concern among religious and colonial authorities in rural communities and missions during epidemics and in relation to indigenous women. Explicitly colonial settings, such as in tributary Indian communities and missions, coupled with times of stress such as epidemics, allowed supporters of the procedure to gain access to the women. Furthermore, urban and rural accounts of fetal death in the uterus from mistreatment and epidemic disease reveal how political, religious, and medical officials, as well as colonial subjects caught up in these cases, deployed or took advantage of colonial categories of difference for a range of tactical reasons: to gain surgical access to the uterus, police miscarriages, and make claims about fetuses and pregnant women based on gender, ethnicity, and economic standing, as well as on their tributary Indian, slave, or free social status in colonial society. This comparison further shows the ways that the attention paid to the fetus as a colonial subject, who required regulatory control and protection, politicized the fetus in unintended ways in colonial social relations. Returning to the mission communities of the Petén region and one of the examples that opened this chapter, Nicolasa Chatá’s postmortem cesarean was one of four such procedures that took place in 1799 and 1800. Domingo Fajardo, the priest responsible for the presidio’s residents, gave an account of them in a letter published in the Gazeta de Guatemala. Significantly, he referred to three publications when explaining his decision to go forward with postmortem cesareans: articles that he had read in the Gazeta de Guatemala and the Gazeta de Madrid, and Rodríguez’s postmortem cesarean manual.96 Fajardo is evidently part of the literate demographic outside colonial cities to which such media appealed, demonstrating the role print media had begun to play in the circulation of information and descriptions of postmortem cesareans, even to a frontier area at the edges of the Spanish empire. Fajardo’s decision to write and send a letter to the Gazeta de Guatemala suggests that he was a self-promoter, but also shows

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how print media created opportunities for feedback, which in the case of postmortem cesareans and fetuses recirculated the sacred and secular policy ideas that underpinned them throughout the empire. He consciously presented himself in these terms, writing of how “this unknown corner of the world” nevertheless remained connected to the larger eighteenth-century world by enacting the procedure.97 Fajardo provided the most detail for the married indigenous woman Nicolasa Chatá’s cesarean, as he saw her as exceptional: “It is necessary to refer to [Nicolasa Chatá’s] heroic death that fittingly shows the strong religious beliefs found among the Indians.”98 The account reads as a parable of a converted indigenous woman who demonstrated her religious fervor and commitment to Christianity by asking that the (postmortem) cesarean take place while she was still alive. Chatá, recognizing she would not survive the smallpox, reportedly “begged” the barber to perform the cesarean on her body while she still lived so that fetus in her womb would not perish without baptism. Fajardo, also present at her sick bed, consoled her, but refused to allow the procedure until after her death; that is, he held to the official guidelines governing the procedure. After she perished, the Indian barber extracted a living fetus, which was then baptized but died soon after. None of the other three women who underwent postmortem cesareans elicited Fajardo’s admiring observations. Fajardo saw Chatá as “heroic,” using his words, because she asked that the cesarean be performed before she died, in effect putting the fetus’s health before her own. The narrative of Chatá’s death and cesarean is meant to show the redemptive possibilities of both Indians as converts and Indians as medical practitioners in the ser vice of the colonial state, in this case trained to perform a postmortem cesarean. Because the Petén had only come under colonial rule in the last one hundred years, it made sense to highlight the performance of cesareans there, especially those conducted on indigenous women by indigenous men, to promote ongoing political and religious colonization processes. How do we explain the appearance of the Indian barber who performed Chatá’s cesarean? Fajardo writes that the barber “had been instructed during the earlier [postmortem cesarean] procedures.”99 At least two such cesareans had been conducted before the epidemic took Chatá’s life, one each by the presidio surgeon and the priest. Possibly this barber had been present during the other cesareans and had learned the procedure from observation and by assisting as well. Just this one phrase in a letter to the Gazeta reveals a transmission chain of knowledge of new surgical techniques between medical professionals, priests, and barbers. Moreover, this knowledge transmission crosses racial, religious, and scientific professional

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and cultural boundaries thought to separate medical professionals and paraprofessionals in colonial society. This detail also reveals an example of the participation of Indians in the new sciences of the Enlightenment when the Indian barber then performed a cesarean unassisted, though he did conduct it in the presence of the missionary priest who was there, as the instructions demanded, to baptize the extracted fetus. Why could a postmortem cesarean be left in the hands of an Indian barber? Successful colonization also depended in part on the ability of colonial officials to form alliances with indigenous elites and others, such as the Indian barber, to maintain order, transmit Spanish cultural and medical practices, and promote Christianity among the colonized peoples. Fajardo does not characterize the barber’s performance of the cesarean as exceptional, however. In fact, Fajardo does no more than mention him briefly, and does not name him as he does some of the other men in this narrative, including the priest and the presidio surgeon who performed the other cesareans. Indian men also performed postmortem cesareans elsewhere in New Spain. Rosemary Valle documented sixteen cesareans conducted in earlynineteenth- century Alta California (now the state of California), and Indian men at the Mission San José performed two of them. In December 1825, Narciso and Silvestre, both described as Indian, together performed a postmortem cesarean under the supervision of Fray Narciso Durán. In March 1829, the same Indian Narciso performed another alone at the Mission San José, again supervised by the same priest.100 As these examples show, the appearance of an Indian barber in Guatemala was not completely exceptional in the context of postmortem cesareans. Nor was the figure of the Indian healer in colonial society. The Maya and other pre- Columbian Mesoamerican peoples had well-developed medical cultures with a sophisticated range of healing specialists. After the conquest period, despite Christianization campaigns and the shock of mass deaths from epidemic disease, indigenous communities continued to socially reproduce an adapted and transformed medical tradition, and indigenous medical specialists passed on medical knowledge and trained the next generation of healers. In colonial society, Mesoamerican medicine came to be associated with a wide range of medical practices and healing abilities that included barbering and midwifery skills. Furthermore, in eighteenth-century Guatemala, the majority of medical treatments necessarily relied on nonexperts, such as barbers, healer-bloodletters, midwives, priests, and other nonuniversity-trained healers. In certain cases, then, the greater goal of colonial

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medical policies, here putting into operation the policy of requiring postmortem cesareans, outweighed racial hierarchies and the exigencies of professional boundary-making in official colonial medicine. The existence of sanctioned indigenous healers in these contexts also showed the flexibility of the Church in counteracting or strategically co-opting Mesoamerican medical cultures. Of the three other cesareans conducted that season, another also occurred during the same smallpox epidemic that caused Chatá’s death, after the married indigenous woman Juana May also perished from the disease. Fajardo did not elaborate, but simply noted that her fetus lived through the baptism before dying. The missionary priest of San Andrés performed a cesarean on another married indigenous woman named Dominga Chatá, baptizing the infant conditionally because it did not show signs of life after extraction. The fourth was performed by the presidio surgeon Severino Luna, who presented the fetus to Fajardo after extracting it from the woman’s body. Fajardo baptized her conditionally because at first he saw no signs of life. The priest continued: “Two minutes later I had the pleasure of seeing [signs of] life in her, she moved the fingers of one hand, and she gasped and took a breath on 16 November 1799, the same date as her burial.”101 This description indicated to the newspaper’s readers that the procedure could indeed produce a living fetus, or at least one that survived long enough to be baptized. The Gazeta accounts show that three of the four cesareans took place on Indian women who lived in missions, an institution that controlled and policed new indigenous converts, and as such, a quintessential colonial environment. Other studies that have identified the actual performance of cesareans in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Spain show that one commonality was that postmortem cesareans, when they occurred, tended to be carried out on Indian women in mission communities. This was so much the case that historian John Tate Lanning, referring to colonial Mexico, dubbed them “frontier cesareans.”102 The fourth cesarean involved a woman of unidentified ethnic origins and was performed at the Presidio Petén Itzá, a colonial-era garrison that the Spanish used in frontier areas, and so a militarized social space. Though Fajardo described the four pregnant women as married, oddly nowhere do the husbands appear as playing an active role in his narrative. Instead, missionary priests and other men (the presidio surgeon and the Indian barber) take over the role of patriarchal figure. The spread of new colonial policies toward fetuses and women of childbearing age, along with the political and medical connections that helped forge these policies, also occurred through the circulation of surgeons

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to different posts throughout the Audiencia. Severino Luna, the presidio surgeon who performed one of the four cesareans in Fajardo’s letter, also participated as a medical expert in a criminal prosecution in the capital earlier in his career, in a case of a miscarried fetus caused by physical violence against a pregnant woman.103 The effect of the colonial state’s program for raising awareness about postmortem cesareans can be seen in the other case with which we began this chapter. Both the Indian magistrates and Alcalde Gálvez were not particularly concerned by the fact of the Indian woman’s homicide; the record shows no concerted effort to find the perpetrator and instead shows a strong focus on the possibility of the death of a fetus.104 When the officials arrived at the site, the scribe wrote down the initial findings, which remarked on three things—that the woman appeared Indian because of her clothing, that there was no obvious wound or injury apparent on her body as far as they could see at that point, and that her abdomen appeared swollen.105 When the men returned to the capital with the body, they requested a surgeon to perform an autopsy on her the next morning to ascertain cause of death “and because of her enlarged uterus.”106 This suggests that the official routine by this time dictated a sensitivity to any signs of pregnancy. Here, Gálvez evidently recognized that the Indian woman may have died while pregnant and thus, in compliance with practices recommended by the official postmortem cesarean decree of 1785, notified the surgeon “immediately” after they returned. The following morning, two male specialists examined the Indian woman’s body. José María Martínez de Zevallos, an official of the Royal Crime Division (Real Sala de Crimen) examined her first. The documents do not list any formal medical title for Martínez as they do for others in this case. Martínez wrote in his report that he “registered the cadaver” and did a visual examination of her body, looking for cause of death. He did not find any type of evidence that she had been beaten, finding only what he called “cut up” skin from her left breast to her abdomen, and similar marks on her arms and hands.107 After Martínez finished his assessment, surgeon Francisco Zuñiga conducted the autopsy. He began with her mouth and throat, finding only bloody material mixed with saliva but no obvious wound. Zuñiga examined her vaginal area and found what he considered an extreme amount of bloody material in the vagina and on her legs. “Because of this,” Zuñiga testified, “and because of the [condition] of the uterus, it was necessary to perform the cesarean procedure.”108 Zuñiga did not find a fetus in the womb. From this physical evidence and the absence of a fetus, he concluded that the woman had recently given birth or had died during childbirth.109

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Elements of this case show similarities to the Petén cesareans. The murdered woman was described as indigenous, as three of the four women in the Petén also were. Just as the Gazeta article described the Petén women solely in relation to male priests or medical workers, their bodies located in an enclosed colonial space, so, too, does the court record describe the murder victim solely in relation to the indigenous magistrates and secular Guatemalan officials. Given that she was found dead in a ravine, and that she remained unidentified and unrecognized (with no attempt, on record, to find out who she was)—her isolation was complete. In death she had no husband, sexual partner, family, or friends to oppose the autopsy or cesarean. This may have facilitated the work of the officials to conduct the autopsy and postmortem cesarean because they had no resistance to overcome. In contrast to the Petén cases, however, Zuñiga made no mention in his account of a desire to save the fetal soul. No priest or midwife was present as recommended in the manuals. This is the case even though after the autopsy the same officials were in contact with the parish priest of Los Remedios, to whom they turned the woman’s body over for burial that same day and to whom they presumably could have also turned to for a potential fetal baptism.110 It was clear from the start that the woman was dead, and that she had suffered severe physical trauma, including in her abdominal area. This made fetal survival, it seems, reasonably unlikely. Here the surgeon performed the cesarean for a secular reason, as part of the criminal investigation. While the general motivation behind the procedure was, as per the president’s decree, a religious concern for fetal salvation, the fetus could be extracted from a dead woman’s uterus for other reasons. This may seem a small exception to the rule, but it is symptomatic of the importance of secular concerns of colonial rule, having to do with public health and enlightened governance, that could supersede or displace religious concerns. Finally, I turn to some examples from the criminal court involving miscarriages resulting from various types of violence against women in colonial society.111 The shift in the understanding of the fetus—the reconfiguration of the interior and exterior boundaries of the body defining the fetus and the fetus’s relationship to the pregnant woman—was part of a larger narrative of the bio-political identity of the colonial subject. On this ground, narratives of fetuses extracted from dead women in postmortem cesareans can be usefully compared to societal attitudes revealed by incidents in which living women miscarried deceased fetuses as a result of domestic or other types of violence. These cases show how colonial officials, medical practitioners, and others involved did not view all fetuses as

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having the same humanitarian right to health and baptism. The social circumstances of pregnant women, including ethnicity, economic status, and the gender of all parties involved, conditioned the responses and attitudes toward fetuses and pregnant women in colonial society along with the context of the violence that resulted in miscarriage. These colonial hierarchies, for instance, helped to structure a 1793 criminal case in which a pregnant indigenous woman miscarried as the result of violence perpetrated by her former sexual partner and his new lover. The case began at 9 a.m. one morning for Alcalde Pedro Juan de Lara, who prosecuted criminal cases in the capital and surrounding towns, with the appearance in his office of “a woman with a dead fetus (feto)” wrapped in cotton cloth.112 The woman was Ysabel Trejo, a thirty- eight-year- old midwife. With this evidence, the alcalde immediately convened a formal court proceeding, called a royal scribe to take testimony, and swore in Trejo. She recounted how the day before, a twenty-four year old Indian woman named Feliciana Margarita Mexicanos sent word that she needed help with her pregnancy.113 Trejo went to Mexicanos’s home on the outskirts of the capital, and found her grinding corn. Before the midwife could examine Mexicanos, the pregnant woman had to urinate, and went out in back of the house. A short time later, she yelled for the midwife to come to her, and when Trejo did “she found the miscarried fetus (aborto) on the ground.” The midwife picked it up and examined it, and while she did, Mexicanos explained that a beating that she received from a man and woman led to the miscarriage.114 Martínez de Zevallos inspected the miscarried fetus and wrote up a report on his findings that included a drawing of the fetus.115 Martínez measured the fetus and found it three fingers long and one finger thick. It appeared “to be made of glass, the color of cooked almidón,” a type of starch extracted from wheat. While Martínez did examine bodies in criminal proceedings in the capital city as part of his responsibilities, there is no indication that he had a medical degree or formal medical training of any kind, a fact that is evident from his rough sketch of the fetus. The court then called on the doctor Narciso Esparragosa to examine the woman who miscarried, and together they traveled, along with the court scribe, to Mexicanos’s home.116 All three were present during the interview, held at her bedside as she recovered from her miscarriage.117 When asked by the alcalde why she miscarried, Mexicanos replied with the following account: Two weeks earlier, she had gone out in the evening to borrow some money. She ran into Antonio Pineda, her former lover and, as she called him, the dueño de su preñez (“the owner of her pregnancy”), whom she had

Figure 4. Image of the miscarried fetus of Feliciana Margarita Mexicanos, presented by her midwife to colonial authorities at the criminal court, 1793. AGCA A2.2-123-3444, “Sobre la averiguación de los causantes en el mal parto de Feliciana Mexicanos por un hombre y una mujer que le maltrataban,” 1793, f.  2. Courtesy of the Archivo General de Centro América, Guatemala City, Guatemala.

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not seen since before Lent. Pineda was with another woman named Juana Pérez, his current lover. The three began a verbal argument that quickly turned physical when Pérez pushed Mexicanos to the ground and jumped on top of her, pressing her knees into the pregnant woman’s stomach while the two traded blows. Since that time, Mexicanos had experienced pain and tightness in her uterus, such that she felt as if she were suffocating. On the morning of the miscarriage, the pain was strong enough that she had sent for the midwife. Based on the fetal remains, Esparragosa judged the fetus to be in its third month of development when Mexicanos miscarried.118 Esparragosa presented his medical findings to the court a few days later. He concluded that the blows Mexicanos received during the fight caused the miscarriage. At this point the alcalde ordered the arrest of Mexicanos’s former lover Pineda, a twenty-two-year- old mixed-race soldier and member of the local mulato militia, and Pérez, a twenty- one-year- old single Indian woman, for causing the miscarriage. Pineda was thrown into the Royal Jail; Pérez was imprisoned in a casa de recogidas, a “house of enclosed women” in the capital. These houses were run as religious institutions that, among other things, functioned as a jail for disorderly and criminal women in colonial society. It was not until May 29, one month after their arrest and imprisonment, that Alcalde Lara finally questioned the two separately.119 From the two testimonies, it became clear that Pineda did not hit Mexicanos, and so Lara released him to the care of his commanding officer. Lara did hold Pérez responsible for the miscarriage, however, and charged her “with complicity in Feliciana Margarita Mexicanos’s miscarriage.”120 Because of Pérez’s indigenous status, she was assigned a court-appointed defense lawyer to assist in her case, and returned to the casa de recogidas. A little less than a month later, the asesor responsible for determining criminal punishment reviewed the case and testimonies. Rather than considering Pérez’s role in Mexicanos’s miscarriage as criminal, he instead dismissed the events as “the result of a jealous passion” between the two women, asserting that this kind of conflict “is frequent among women of their class.”121 He decided that Pérez had been imprisoned long enough— three months at that point—and set her free. The sources provide no information about what ultimately happened to the fetal remains or to Mexicanos. Nor is there mention of any religious intervention in this case. In another criminal case from 1790, investigators focused on a miscarriage precipitated by a debt collection that turned into a street brawl involving three women and two men. The investigators were not at all concerned with the intimidation used by the debt collectors. Instead, they focused on the miscarriage, thought to have been caused by a blow to the pregnant

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wife of the debtor. This led to a charge of homicide of the fetus against the perpetrators. The case began one afternoon in March when husband and wife Marcelino Golpeado and Rosa Meyda appeared before Alcalde Tadeo Piñol y Muñoz and accused a man and two women of severely beating both of them while attempting to collect on a debt that Golpeado owed.122 The couple charged that one of the three, Bonifacio Rogel, kicked Meyda in the stomach, “which caused her to miscarry on 20 March as is public knowledge and well-known.”123 Piñol sent the couple to be examined by a surgeon. Next, the alcalde gave an order for representatives of the court to arrest the three responsible for the violence: Bernardina Villalta, a forty- six-year- old married mulata who was trying to collect a small debt owed to her; her twenty-seven-yearold son Bonifacio Rogel (described as the person who kicked Meyda and directly caused the miscarriage), a married free mulato tailor; and Rogel’s wife, Gervasia Pacheco, a thirty- seven-year- old mixed-race seamstress. Authorities imprisoned all three in the Royal Jail in the capital. Those investigating the violence and miscarriage charged the three perpetrators with homicide (homicidio) of the fetus (called a criatura in the sources), without noting in the file why the alcalde decided to press this particular charge.124 The charge, however, would have been consistent with Pedro Arrese’s assertion in his postmortem cesarean manual that the burial of deceased pregnant women constituted fetal homicide: “Burials [of deceased pregnant women] have resulted in an increasing number of homicides [perpetrated against] living fetuses, killing them without the benefit of Holy Baptism.”125 An analysis of the questions posed by the alcalde during the interrogation of Bernardina Villalta suggests that the miscarriage of the fetus from physical violence, and the depravation of fetal baptism, merited the homicide charge: These proceedings show that [Bernardina Villalta] grabbed [Rosa Meyda] by the braids and beat her so that a miscarriage resulted, because [Meyda] was pregnant. And from this disgraceful act a dead fetus (criatura) was born, who did not receive the baptismal water. And for this we charge this criminal with homicide, and because she caused this soul to be deprived of the presence of God.126

In questioning the daughter-in-law Gervasia Pacheco, however, the alcalde focused solely on the violence perpetrated on the pregnant woman’s abdomen, however, and not on the lack of fetal baptism. Pacheco and her

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mother-in-law Villalta grabbed Meyda by her braids and hit her while Pacheco’s husband Bonifacio kicked her in the abdomen. All three contributed to Meyda’s miscarriage (aborto), “which resulted in homicide [perpetrated] by these three criminals.”127 Each of the accused attempted to deflect the charge of homicide by providing a different explanation for the miscarriage. The imprisoned “criminals” (reos, as they were called in the testimony) knew a surprising amount about Meyda’s miscarriage, or at least they portrayed themselves as having detailed knowledge. This is despite the fact that the two women had been captured and imprisoned immediately after the beating, while the man, Rogel, fled the capital after the fight and hid in the town of Escuintla. After two months in prison, the alcalde questioned Villalta, who testified that there was no way “three whacks with a piece of firewood” could have caused a woman to miscarry “that child.”128 And in any case, she, Villalta, was not at fault because she did not wield the firewood. The alcalde also questioned Villalta’s son Rogel in an interrogation room at the Royal Jail after he returned to the capital. He told authorities that he had heard from his wife that Meyda had a miscarriage, but that he did not cause it because “he only hit her [Meyda] on the head with his hands.”129 The third defendant, Rogel’s wife Pacheco, perhaps to deflect attention away from her husband’s alleged role in the miscarriage, offered two different theories for Meyda’s miscarriage. First, Pacheco suggested that the miscarriage was caused by the medicinal bloodletting treatments that the surgeon Severino Luna administered to Meyda as she began to experience miscarriage symptoms. Then Pacheco tried to blame Meyda for causing her own miscarriage. After the melee, Pacheco said that she saw the couple riding on horseback, apparently traveling to denounce the incident to the alcalde. Such physical activity so late in the pregnancy, Pacheco implied, led to the miscarriage.130 Three medical specialists, two surgeons and a midwife, testified as medical experts and provided their differing explanations for the miscarriage. In contrast to the accused, the medical specialists focused on the suspicious lack of fetal remains and on what they called Meyda’s “hysterical tendencies.” None of the medical specialists who testified before the court saw or examined the miscarried fetus. Angela María Montoya, a fifty-year-old midwife who treated Meyda during her miscarriage symptoms, estimated she had been about six months pregnant when the miscarriage occurred. The midwife noted, however, that she was not present during the miscarriage itself and she had not seen or examined the fetus; she had only heard about it after it occurred. When asked if riding on a horse could cause a miscarriage, Montoya responded that it might.131

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Surgeon Nicolás Montúfar judged that Meyda’s pregnancy had been in the later stages when she miscarried. He argued that her symptoms of hysteria, and not the violence, caused the miscarriage. Montúfar did find evidence of a beating on Meyda’s body; he noted a contusion on her head and others on her shoulders. But in his opinion, these were only superficial. The miscarriage occurred because Meyda was “rather hysterical; because of the hysterical tendencies that she was inclined to suffer from.”132 The physical symptoms included “strong hysterical shakes and jolts” that caused her to “regularly dislocate her jaw” a symptom that Montúfar said he had seen in other pregnant women in the hours before they miscarried.133 Surgeon Severino Luna focused on the suspicious lack of fetal remains in conjunction with her “hysterical privations.”134 According to Luna, the blows to her abdomen and the medicinal bloodletting and other therapies he used to treat her hysterical symptoms may have helped cause the miscarriage.135 Luna had treated Meyda during the illness that led up to the miscarriage at the request of her husband. When he arrived at the house, he found Meyda in this midst of a hysterical privation that included violent spasms. In response, he applied ligaduras, bindings tied tightly around the abdominal muscles of a person who has “lost their senses” so that the pain from the bindings would cause them to “return to themselves.”136 The ligaduras had no effect on the pregnant woman, so Luna decided to bleed her right away. By this point, Luna asserted, it seemed certain that she would miscarry later that day. When Luna returned to check on Meyda at 6 p.m., she showed “clear signs” that she was in the midst of the miscarriage. Luna applied more medicines and left for the night. When he returned the next morning at 6 a.m., Meyda and her husband told him that the miscarriage had occurred during the night at 3 a.m. Luna asked to see the miscarried fetus (he called it “la criatura”), but the couple told him that Meyda gave it to Joaquín Ruela, a fifty-year- old bricklayer and compadre to the couple (“compadre” signifies ritual kinship). He had taken the miscarried fetus to the nearby Dominican monastery, most likely for burial. Luna stated that Meyda and her husband never showed him the criatura so that he could examine it “and testify before the court about whether [the fetus] lived or died,” which cast some suspicion on the couple.137 He went on to imply that the fetus survived the miscarriage and had been hidden away by the couple. Luna said that when he returned the second time to take possession of the miscarried criatura, they told him that the fetus had been baptized.138 This detail suggested to Luna that the fetus had to have been born alive (miscarried fetuses born dead were not baptized according to theological doctrine, and he most likely knew this as a surgeon who presided over other difficult births).139 Luna added that the fetus had

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been alive at least until the day before the miscarriage, because he felt the fetus move in Meyda’s uterus. This fact also indicated that the fetus could have been born alive.140 The alcalde interrogated family friend Joaquín Ruela, who affirmed that Meyda had asked him to “carry the [miscarried] criatura to the Santo Domingo Convent and place it on a long wooden bench.”141 Then he sentenced Rogel, whom he saw as the main person responsible for the miscarriage, to six months hard labor in public works. At this point the case seems to end. Puzzlingly, given the testimony, the documents do not reveal what further punishments, if any, the two women received. There is no formal record of whether the alcalde confirmed with the Dominican monastery that the miscarried fetal remains had been taken there. In this case of a charge of fetal homicide, male and female family members, neighbors, and even the accused criminals themselves, seem well acquainted with the intimate details of Meyda’s pregnancy and miscarriage. Granted, the miscarriage did occur in relatively dramatic circumstances after a public bout of violence that attracted the attention of neighbors and passersby. The husband, his pregnant wife, three accused criminals, neighbors, and the three medical practitioners all discussed the miscarriage details in their testimonies and referred to the events as “public knowledge,” using the phrase “por pública voz.” Another case from 1788 again reveals the differences in the colonial and modern structuring of the cleavage between the private and the public through how intimate details of a woman’s pregnancy and miscarriage become public knowledge. Lázaro Silvestre, a tributary Indian from the village of Pinula, sent a written complaint to an Audiencia judge charging that his wife miscarried her fetus during her sixth month of pregnancy after receiving a punishment of ten lashes.142 Silvestre described how he owed thirteen pesos, and so far he had only been able to pay off eight pesos. When Don José Bausello came to their pueblo looking to collect the remaining five pesos and could not find Silvestre, he located his wife, who was out performing her required repartimiento labor. Bausello told her that she and her husband must immediately pay the five pesos or provide twenty-five cow hides in kind. When the pregnant woman refused to pay and returned to her home, Bausello gathered the constable and town alcalde. Together the officials walked to the woman’s home, where on Bausello’s orders the alcalde lashed her ten times as punishment. Silvestre asserted that his wife miscarried after receiving the punishment. Because Silvestre and his wife had the legal status of tributary Indians, they appealed directly to Audiencia officials in this instance, as they also

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did for things like relief in cases of epidemic disease or environmental stresses and for justice in the case of excessive violence meted out by colonial officials. This system meant that tributary Indians were both vulnerable to physical punishments because of a tribute collector’s demands, but they could also use legal channels as a means of redress for abuses. The miscarried fetus, if it had survived, would have retained its parent’s tributary status and so would have contributed wealth and labor to the colonial state. The miscarriage resulted in the loss to the Audiencia, and to the Crown, of a future tributary Indian and the fruits of its labor and tax payments. For this reason, district officer Lorenzo Montúfar became involved and wrote a report of the events explaining the situation to Audiencia officials.143 Montúfar confirmed that Bausello wanted to collect the remaining payment from Silvestre, and when he could not find him, he confronted his wife. “She responded with a haughtiness that characterize the women of this village,” Montúfar wrote. An insulted Bausello ordered that she be given ten lashes.144 The town’s alcalde “immediately” carried out the punishment. Montúfar continued that “what is not proven is the miscarriage (aborto),” basing this point on what he described as the suspicious lack of the miscarried fetal body.145 He explained that the midwife who treated Silvestre’s wife agreed that a miscarriage did not occur, and paraphrased her opinion: “It is true that [Silvestre’s wife] had a great amount of bleeding [after the whipping], but [the midwife] did not see the fetus (feto), nor anything else, and so she is mistaken.”146 Audiencia officials ordered him to explore the issues further, take formal testimony from various witnesses, and report back as quickly as possible. There the case ends, however; nothing in the records reveals whether the order was carried out or how the case was resolved. It appears, then, that a female tributary Indian’s pregnancy did not protect her or her fetus from physical punishments meted out by colonial authorities, nor were any measures taken in this example to ensure fetal baptism in case the of miscarriage from the punishment. Like tributary status in indigenous women, slave status in colonial society transmitted to the fetus via its location in an enslaved woman’s uterus. Furthermore, a developing fetus located in the uterus of a female slave could be bought and sold; its fetal status did not provide any special protections from this aspect of slavery. In 1779, the widow Doña Manuela de Sabaleta, a resident of Cartago in what is now Costa Rica, sold the unborn fetus gestating in the uterus of her mulata slave Manuela.147 Doña Manuela noted in the bill of sale dated a year earlier “that a slave of mine named Manuela found herself pregnant, and I sold the fetus (feto) that she had in

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her uterus to my daughter Doña Dominga for 25 silver pesos, taking all the risk, so that the criatura that would be born would belong to Juana Nasaria, one of her daughters.”148 Interestingly, Doña Manuela waited to “put the sale into effect” only after the infant was born alive, named Josepha Catharina, was baptized, and reached nine months of age, thus shown to be viable.149 There is an interesting tension here: slave status extended to the fetus so that it could be bought and sold in utero, as the newborn child of a slave woman could be as well.150 As part of the bill of sale, Doña Dominga testified that “I acknowledge that the designated little mulata slave has been sold since she existed in her mother’s uterus.”151 While location in the womb did not seem to have afforded any special protection for the fetus of an enslaved woman, the safe delivery of newborn slaves and their baptism did remain important. As part of colonizing process, slave owners had the responsibility to baptize slaves and teach them Christianity. Furthermore, the colonial state who owned slaves, as well as individual slave owners, could emphasize the importance of the health of newborn slaves, so much so that a midwife might be hired to treat pregnant slave women during labor to increase the chances of viable enslaved infants. In 1783, in the port town of Omoa on the Atlantic coast of colonial Central America, María de la Luz Palma worked as “His Majesty’s midwife to Black slaves.”152 Palma received a salary of eighty pesos from the Crown for presiding over the birth of infants to slave mothers from August 1, 1782, to September 23, 1783. During that period, Palma safely delivered twenty newborns to slave women (fourteen females and six males), including a set of fraternal twins.153 Palma received her salary from the royal treasury at the rate of four pesos for each live birth plus the subsequent care of the newborn for eight days afterward. Also present at the births, though not mentioned by name, was a priest who named and baptized each of the newborns, information duly recorded in the documents that the midwife presented to royal officials so that she could receive her salary. No mention was made, however, of any miscarriages or newborn deaths, nor was there any information provided about any potential death of a female slave during childbirth. What does a comparison of cesarean, miscarriage, and slave birth records and the receipt from the sale of a slave in utero tell us about late eighteenth-century attitudes toward the fetus? For one thing, it underscores the way that pregnant women were subject to two seemingly antithetical policy impulses. The autonomy women traditionally had over the pregnancy, at least until the quickening, dissolved because they were being treated in the political, medical, and religious discourse as mere carriers of

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the fetus. At the same time, the discourses held women responsible to the political establishment for the fetus and even, at a rhetorical level, marked women with the guilt of “confining” the fetus in “filthy” conditions. This provided an ambiguity in women’s power in colonial society. Postmortem cesareans violated the dignity and privacy of the dead pregnant woman and enacted a kind of violence against dying pregnant women. However, as the miscarriage cases show, women could strategically evoke the rights of the fetus to protect themselves from arbitrary violence or to redress that violence. But just as the shifting status of the fetus intervened in the social status of women in colonial Guatemalan society, it also impacted men, given other factors such as class and ethnicity. Often the only men to act in postmortem cesarean narratives are priests or medical practitioners. Male relatives, or the male spouse or sexual partner, seem to be entirely occluded. Of course, male family members did tend to pregnant women or called in midwives or other medical specialists when needed. The role of husbands and partners, hidden in accounts of postmortem cesareans, come into the open in cases of violence-induced miscarriages. Here, the records of the criminal courts are replete with male relatives, neighbors, colonial officials, medical personnel, and even those accused of perpetrating the violence. Many of them seemed able and willing to provide intimate and detailed knowledge of miscarriages and weighed in on their causes. The fetus thus played a role in late colonial politics in both ideology and practice as a category of colonial subject, or as so defined in postmortem cesarean manuals and supporting doctrines. The fetus was a living and ensouled being enclosed in the uterus, and thus its death was the subject of sacred and secular interest. It is in this role that a deceased fetal body became plausible evidence of abuse or crime in legal cases investigating violence-induced miscarriages for some women, and its absence grounds of suspicion other cases. Oddly, however, the fetal body seems to often disappear in miscarriage cases, showing a certain contradiction between the obsessive state and religious interest in every detail of the fetus who is surgically extracted from the dead women and a startling lack of interest in the supposedly dead fetus who is delivered or miscarried from the abused pregnant woman. For such accusations to move forward, medical specialists such as midwives and surgeons had to testify to being present at the time of the miscarriage and to seeing the miscarried fetus. Or the actual miscarried fetal body needed to be produced, as in the example of Feliciana Mexicanos, whose midwife wrapped the deceased fetal body in a cloth and presented it to the alcalde in his office as evidence that the miscarriage had indeed occurred. But in

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other cases, there is some ambiguity here as well, as Rosa Meyda never seemed to have produced a fetus, though her compadre testified that he transported one to a nearby monastery. Finally, the colonial state’s embrace of the ideology and practices of postmortem cesareans was, evidently, not just about religion and health. In the edict by which President Estachería made postmortem cesareans mandatory, one of the justifications of the law was that it would put Guatemala on par with the policy of an international community of modern “nations,” even though in the late eighteenth-century Guatemala still remained a colony of the Spanish Empire. At its core, then, policy was also about political attitudes of the colonial elite—an enlightenment vision of modernity, part of the efforts put forth by elites to re-vision colonial Guatemala where everyone, including indigenous populations, women, and fetuses had to be made into subjects. It was at the crossroads of eighteenth-century colonial society, the spread of Enlightenment doctrines to governance, the continuing power of the Church, and the emergence of medicine that targeted the health of colonial populations that fetal identity was created, marked by the state’s intervention into the most intimate matters of the domestic sphere and new definitions of the human.

chapter four

How to Inoculate Indians

The governor of Chiapas, Agustín de las Cuentas Zayas, notified Audiencia and Protomedicato authorities in early 1794 that smallpox had broken out. This particular epidemic had first emerged in the Atlantic port city of Campeche on the Yucatán peninsula, then spread along the main mail and trade routes to towns in Tabasco, and from there to Chiapas.1 Initially, the governor thought it relatively easy to protect the region by stationing men at key points to block travelers, muleteers, and other movement of humans and domestic animals coming from infected areas.2 By that spring, however, outbreaks appeared in numerous towns in Chiapas. Once it became clear that smallpox had breached the quarantine line, many worried that it would be “virtually impossible to avoid a general infection of the entire kingdom [of Guatemala].”3 Colonial officials, including members of the Audiencia, provincial authorities, and medical physicians such as Protomédico José Flores, were certain the epidemic would continue to spread along the Royal Road, the main road connecting cities in the region to the capital Nueva Guatemala, as well as along the roads, trails, and footpaths that connected Chiapas to the neighboring districts of Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango, as waves of diseases such as smallpox had traveled these same routes during previous outbreaks.4 Quarantine and inoculation needed to be quickly implemented in the provinces bordering infected areas. The Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango districts were located in Guatemala’s western highlands, a region that despite its geographic distance from key urban centers saw significant movement of people, animals, and trade goods along its roads that connected 133

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Chiapas to the capital. For Indians to become part of the humanity that Flores envisioned as a component of his commitment to Enlightenment medicine, colonial campaigns to medically save Indians from smallpox justified the widespread use of inoculation, “for justice, and to obey God, the King, and La Patria (the Guatemala homeland) that [we] must care for, so that the inhabitants of the pueblos next to [those infected with] smallpox can be protected with the inoculation method.”5 A significant percentage of indigenous populations lived in towns in those two provinces. As a result, smallpox also threatened an impor tant source of colonial wealth and manpower for the Audiencia and the Spanish Crown. The humanitarian impulse to medically save Indians intertwined with economic goals of protecting the colonial economy; both proved major motivating factors for the ensuing inoculation campaign. Colonial medical and political authorities, however, faced the thorny problem of exactly how to inoculate Indians. Smallpox inoculation campaigns in the highlands could not simply replicate the earlier 1780 campaign carried out in Nueva Guatemala, a capital city and major urban center with a relative abundance of medical, political, and religious men who donated funds and provided policing and medical labor to ensure its success. Doctors expected a significant measure of resistance from indigenous populations, and this was reflected in the inoculation manuals created specifically for this particular outbreak. Even in the best of times, many indigenous towns in the highlands were difficult to reach over treacherous roads; Guatemala’s rainy season made travel to these areas even more arduous. The president summed up these obstacles in a letter to the Spanish king, writing that even though provincial officials fought the smallpox outbreak in their districts, with the greatest ardor and effort, they exposed themselves to the barbarity of the Indians who resisted inoculation, contributed [their own funds] to the costs when needed, [and] experienced great hardships on their long treks [to inspect infected towns], [as] did [the alcalde mayor of Totonicapán] Chamorro who lost his baggage [including medical supplies] while crossing a flooded river.6

Given the outbreak’s location in the highlands, and the populations it threatened, antismallpox campaigns would need to actively court and persuade Indian political officials and community leaders to cooperate with medical personnel and their healing therapies. They would also need to adapt to not only to the region’s geography, but also to Mesoamerican and

Map 3. Smallpox Outbreak, 1794–96.

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local medical cultures, technologies, and ritual-medical specialists. Where persuasion and flexibility were not possible however, inoculation campaigns strategically utilized surveillance, militarization, and coercion, justified in the name of protecting the broader public good by stopping the spread of smallpox at any cost.

Colonial Geographies of Epidemic Surveillance In 1780, José Flores had provided key medical leadership for the introduction of inoculation, and the president of the Audiencia again looked to him to organize and implement a centralized, standard response to the impending smallpox threat. In the intervening years, Flores had quickly taken a leadership role in academic and policy issues related to medicine and public health as a professor of medicine at the University of San Carlos and as the first head of the Protomedicato. Furthermore, the Spanish Crown had honored him with the prestigious title of Physician to the King’s Bedchamber.7 Since becoming first chair in medicine at the university in 1783, Flores had worked to improve medical education by teaching anatomy classes, practicing dissection, and constructing anatomical figures made from wax.8 He followed the research of important Enlightenment scientists and physicians and used this work to help guide his own research interests, such as conducting his own series of electrical experiments on frogs based on Luigi Galvani’s work on “animal electricity” to investigate how electrical pulses stimulated muscles and nerves.9 Since the previous smallpox epidemic, Flores extended his medical work into issues of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth, research that had helped shape Guatemala’s first postmortem cesarean medical instructions. His work on female reproduction and anatomy included the creation of a life-size wax model of a pregnant woman with fetus that he used in teaching demonstrations. Once word arrived of the smallpox outbreak in Chiapas, Flores met with President José Domas y Valle and other Audiencia officials to begin organizing the needed people and resources for a centralized response. The first line of defense—what the Protomedicato committee led by Flores named its “general preventive inoculation plan”—called for the establishment of quarantine measures adapted to “an understanding of the country”: Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango’s large indigenous populations and mountainous geography.10 Flores himself was born in Ciudad Real de Chiapas, and then attended university in the capital where he obtained his medical degrees. As a result, he was familiar with the routes leading to and from the

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infected regions, as surely others involved in the planning were as well. Officials moved quickly to block the three main roads that connected the western highlands to the Pacific coast, the Camino Real to Chiapas, and the road to Verapaz, “not only to prevent men from traveling, but even the animals.”11 By summer and fall of 1795, however, smallpox gained a foothold in the Totonicapán district, infecting the towns of San Mateo Ixtatán, Santa Eulalia, and San Pedro Soloma in Soloma parish, located roughly nineteen leguas north from the important regional town of Huehuetenango.12 Smallpox also infected the towns of Jacaltenango and San Antonio Huista in neighboring Jacaltenango parish. While relatively remote, the main roads and more obscure paths of Soloma parish nevertheless connected the largely Maya population to important local and regional markets. The economy there centered on corn, wheat, petates, and raising sheep for wool to make cold-weather clothing and blankets, necessary items in towns at higher elevations. San Mateo Ixtatán had a reputation for its salt making, selling it in markets as far away as Quetzaltenango.13 Jacaltenango parish was located between Soloma parish and the smallpox-infested towns of Chiapas.14 In the 1770s, Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz counted a population of 2,711, noting that “within this population there are a few ladinos.”15 The area had a similar political economy as Soloma, growing maize, beans, chile, fruit, raising cattle and sheep, and bee keeping and honey production.16 The roads to Jacaltenango and Soloma parish towns proved difficult to navigate, with many steep inclines and declines, drop- offs, and sections that could only be traveled on foot as the route snaked though plots of corn fields into areas heavily forested with pine trees, oaks, and scrub brush.17 Fray José Camposeco y Lorenzana, the parish priest in charge of Jacaltenango, notified the president of the outbreak, writing that his parish “is infested with smallpox. . . . The only thing [I] hear every day in this town is the miserable daily wailing [that marked] the deaths of children and adults.”18 When epidemics arrived, especially in tributary Indian towns far from colonial centers, priests acted as the direct link between the colonial state and the large, majority Maya populations in this region by notifying provincial and Audiencia authorities and assessing its virulence. In response, the president sent special instructions to the alcaldes mayores and corregidores in charge of provinces or districts that stressed the importance of the quarantine, underscoring the strategic locations of “frontier towns and haciendas”—the towns, hamlets, ranches, and haciendas located along the moving borders between infected and uninfected regions.19 Francisco Chamorro and Prudencio Cozar, the officials in charge

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of Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango, respectively, then had responsibility for the strategic placement of quarantine roadblocks based on their geographic knowledge of the districts under their supervision. The indigenous population in this region was mobile, taking advantage of the Camino Real and other roads and paths that linked towns to trade networks, agricultural fields, and seasonal labor markets in Soconusco and Chiapas to the north and west, and to the Petén and Verapaz to the north an east.20 During the initial outbreak, Chamorro organized four quarantine guard posts to create a barrier between the infected towns and Totonicapán, located in San Antonio Huista, San Miguel Acatán, San Juan Ixcoy, and Santa Eulalia.21 Each post employed at least two soldiers and one “Indian” under the command of one or two guards.22 Local Hispanicized ladinos and Mayas tended to fill the positions of “soldier” and “Indian,” men who knew the geography of the area and were bilingual in Spanish and one of the regional Maya languages. Manuel Hidalgo, who worked the San Antonio Huista quarantine checkpoint, “is from this area, and he is the only ladino that can be found in these tributary Indian towns (reducciones), and [he is] very useful because he is the only one who can interpret that [Maya] language.”23 The pay for each position reflects the military and racial hierarchy in place at the guard posts. The Spanish or ladino guards in charge of the quarantine garnered the highest pay, twelve to fifteen pesos per month. Soldiers received three to four pesos per month, while Indians earned two pesos per month.24 Setting up and maintaining the quarantine roadblocks and its personnel demanded men experienced with managing the soldiers and nonmilitary recruits who worked the quarantine lines and guard posts together. Quarantines demanded attention to detail because of the complicated geography of the mountainous Cuchumantanes. Both provincial officials Chamorro and Cozar had military experience, evidence of what Hall and Brignoli note in their Historical Atlas of Central America as a key transformation of the seventeenth century, when “army officers rather than lawyers were increasingly appointed as both presidents of the Audiencias and provincial governors, presaging the frequent exercise of political power by the military in the [Central American] republics.”25 At the time of the epidemic, Chamorro also held the military title Militia Captain.26 He was at least a second-generation military man, the legitimate son of a military officer, Coronel Don Francisco Chamorro, who was a member of the prestigious Order of Santiago.27 As alcalde mayor, Chamorro established schools, promoted agricultural innovation among Indians, and acted as moneylender and creditor to promote economic development

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in the province.28 Prudencio de Cozar, in charge of Quetzaltenango province, held the military title commandant lieutenant coronel.29 By the time of the epidemic, he had already helped quell an Indian uprising in Santa María Nebaj a few years earlier in 1793, and would do the same in response to subsequent uprisings in areas under his charge. Neither was Cozar a narrow military man: he also participated in the Audiencia’s Enlightenment cultures as a member of the Royal Economic Society, promoting agricultural innovation among the Maya in Quetzaltenango by using his own funds to create small monetary prizes for contests to vet new, innovative plans to improve the quality of wool products, a key regional export.30 Both men ordered quarantine guards to stop merchants, muleteers, and local residents from travelling to and from the capital, “no matter the excuse.”31 Even mail carriers could not pass, with the exception of mounted couriers coming from Nueva Guatemala or employees in the ser vice of the Spanish Crown.32 Yet despite repeated assertions of the success of the quarantines in Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango provinces, local residents, desperate to get their goods or animals to market, or to escape the epidemic, were able to make their way through mountainous terrain where colonial officials could not follow, or along routes unknown to them. Chamorro frequently referred to these types of difficulties faced in enforcing the quarantine lines in his reports, as when he wrote the following: “I am zealously carrying out your orders of 28 July [of establishing and enforcing quarantine roadblocks], and trying to surmount all the difficulties presented, including [the fact that we are] in rainy season, the bad roads, and the unhealthy weather.”33 The Protomedicato had additionally ordered a halt to all movement along “the many other paths that only Indians can successfully travel on.”34 As Chamorro and Cozar worked to establish the quarantine lines, they struggled to counter local residents’ “secret” knowledge of alternative routes that allowed them to avoid the lines. Fray Domingo González blamed such mobile Indians from San Mateo Ixtatán for the outbreak in his parish, charging that despite the quarantine they continued to travel frequently to work in agricultural fields near the infected town of Comitán. Ixtatecos made this trek with their children during the epidemic, even when they had been not yet been exposed to smallpox nor been inoculated, because their parents needed their help to work the fields.35 Similar descriptions of indigenous mobility, flight, and movement during epidemics existed across the highlands. When smallpox broke out in the town of Tajumulco in January 1795, Cozar blamed an Indian man returning from the infested town of Tuxtla with his young nephew in tow, “a

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very contagious little Indian boy.” The two managed to evade quarantine soldiers by walking “through unknown ravines and cliffs located far from the guards.”36 Cozar lamented that despite his reconnaissance efforts in the area, he had been unaware of that par ticular path. As soon as he heard the outbreak news, he wrote, “I went there at once, and I removed him [the little Indian boy] to a milpa seven leguas from the town, far from other houses in that area.”37 Officials additionally forcibly removed and quarantined three other children from the same household who had been exposed to the boy’s smallpox. Though, in the end, smallpox did not spread to the capital during this outbreak, it is unclear to what extent the militarized quarantine lines played a significant role given the multiple breaches discussed in the sources and most likely others that were not recorded because colonial officials never found out about them. Opposition to the road blocks and quarantines continued as residents who ignored them to bring goods and animals to market had an extensive knowledge of the local geography that allowed them to slip past posted guards. Chamorro complained: “I had to overcome many difficulties, and put my life in danger from the great perils [that I faced], because the Indians did not allow [me] to close the trade route to isolate the contagion so that it would not spread to the rest of the Audiencia.”38 Because of these breaches and opposition, each quarantine guard post in Totonicapán built a pillory where recalcitrant farmers, town residents, muleteers, mail carriers, and merchants could be punished or threated with one hundred lashes on site if they did not obey.39 Of course others besides Indians clandestinely crossed quarantine lines or bribed their way through.40 Manuel Hidalgo, the head guard of the San Antonio Huista quarantine post who earlier had been lauded for his local knowledge and bilingual language abilities, allowed a muleteer named Marcelo Gordillo, a resident of the infected town of Comitán, to cross the quarantine line located at San Antonio Huista. Gordillo was bound for the capital, carrying goods for the Marqués Don Juan Fermín de Aycinena, the Audiencia’s wealthiest merchant. San Antonio Huista, where the quarantine post was located, was a small but important regional town because it ser viced travelers, cargo carriers, and muleteers who trekked along the Camino Real.41 Officials placed Gordillo under arrest and confiscated his goods.42 Chamorro increased surveillance at the site by hiring two additional roving guards who circulated on horseback along regional roads and paths, checking for people trying to break through the quarantine.43 While Chamorro had struggled to maintain quarantines in Totonicapán, Cozar faced similar difficulties in Quetzaltenango province. He reckoned

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that in the ten months since the outbreak began in his area, he had organized some 233 miles of quarantine lines, employing 150 men to maintain its integrity, a striking example of militarized colonial presence in the region.44 Quetzaltenango province faced contagion on two fronts, from Chiapas and from Soconusco, where smallpox had spread in late 1795 into 1796. Residents frequently traveled along the many roads, trails, and paths that connected highland Quetzaltenango to lowland Soconusco.45 Military personnel who manned the quarantine lines included salaried soldiers monitoring the roads and the quarantine posts located at the towns of Coatepeque, Santa Lucía Malacatán, Tajumulco, and Tacaná. Three of the soldiers were militia colonels and received a salary of ten pesos per month.46 The fourth, in charge of the quarantine at Tacaná, judged to be the most strategic quarantine point between Quetzaltenango and Soconusco, held the rank of sargento de confianza. He had a slightly higher salary of fifteen pesos per month, given the importance of this site as the nexus of three major roads connecting the two regions.47 Militarization surrounding the antiepidemic campaigns in Quetzaltenango took a slightly different course than in Totonicapán as the quarantines here were dependent on the compelled, unsalaried male labor of local Indians and ladinos combined with salaried military positions.48 Cozar justified this policy by arguing that if all the posts were manned by salaried soldiers, there would be no money left in the community chest funds of the afflicted Indian towns, the primary funding source for the antismallpox campaigns.49 The four towns where the quarantine posts were located provided this labor as needed, and each town provisioned guards with food and housing, “alternating fairly, and in proportion to the size of the pueblos.”50 In effect, this aspect of the antiepidemic campaigns acted as another type the forced labor draft and tax (in kind). By compelling this labor from afflicted communities, Indians and ladinos were introduced to military culture and gained experience as soldiers and guards. Despite the extensive militarized quarantine lines, Tacanecos found them relatively easy to bypass using a “secret” footpath that led from the province to the infected towns of Cacaguatán and Tuxtla.51 After learning of this, Cozar strategically stationed an extra guard further down that same path, ordering him not to leave that location.52 This adjustment proved fortuitous as the guard quickly captured “nine Tacaneco Indians, who tricked the guards above, and descended [down the mountain] with their loads of ocote (firewood made from pine),” presumably bringing it to sell at regional markets.53 The guard took down their names so that they could be reported to the town’s Indian alcaldes and jailed when they returned to their pueblo.

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“To Save the Indians” Despite the mixed success of the quarantines, smallpox spread only in a limited fashion compared to previous outbreaks. In Totonicapán, five pueblos reported smallpox among their residents: San Antonio Huista, Jacaltenago, San Pedro Soloma, San Mateo Ixtatán, and Santa Eulalia; and in Quetzaltenango, only one: Tajumulco. Furthermore, the outbreaks remained isolated in the highlands. Inoculation in combination with quarantine seemed to have helped limit smallpox’s spread, even though colonial medical campaigns failed to inoculate some towns in advance of the epidemics and in others only partially inoculated residents who needed the procedure. Summing up after the epidemic passed, Alcalde Mayor Chamorro wrote that “without [these measures] to save the Indians . . . surely it would have been a huge catastrophe.”54 Inoculation succeeded in San Pedro Soloma, where there were no reported cases of natural smallpox. All 109 recorded cases had been inoculation-induced, that is, caused by inoculation administered by medical campaign workers. In San Antonio Huista, antismallpox workers arrived too late to inoculate, so all the smallpox cases there were from natural smallpox. Three other towns in Totonicapán province reported a mix of natural and inoculation smallpox cases—Jacaltenango, San Mateo Ixtatán, and Santa Eulalia.55 In Quetzeltenango, quarantine and other efforts kept the province smallpox-free until an outbreak began in Tajumulco in January 1795. This pueblo also contained a mix of smallpox cases.56 Of 196 residents who suffered from natural smallpox, 123 died (62.7 percent), and two who survived became blinded. Medical personnel inoculated 631 residents, and among these only 43 died (6.8 percent).57 How did these inoculation campaigns in indigenous highland communities actually work? When the campaigns ran smoothly, details of the process tend to remain relatively invisible in the historical record. In contrast, Indian resistance to inoculation, flight from infected towns, and other kinds of setbacks faced by medical workers produced more detailed and extensive documentation. A combination, then, of official inoculation guidelines and treatment protocols produced by Protomedicato and Audiencia officials, along with descriptions of the inoculation campaigns themselves and the difficulties they faced, reveals the basic outlines of colonial medical campaigns in highland communities. Parish priests or Indian cabildos (town governments) reported disease outbreaks to provincial and Audiencia authorities, a process followed during this and other smallpox outbreaks. As adults, these men would likely

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have experienced and survived at least one smallpox epidemic during their lifetime. Provincial alcaldes or their representatives then traveled to the outbreak area in response to confirm an outbreak and report further details. Alcaldes took this step because sometimes local observers misdiagnosed an illness as smallpox. When Cozar received word of a smallpox outbreak in the towns of San Lorenzo, Santa Rosa, and Comitancillo, he dispatched Domingo Hidalgo, “learned in medicine and surgery,” to the towns and examine the children. When the inspector returned, he reported to Cozar that he did not, in fact, find any cases of smallpox, only “pustules” and “rash and scabies,” much to the relief of colonial officials.58 During the inoculation campaigns, officials waited to conduct mass inoculations until after a smallpox case was discovered in a town or when an outbreak occurred in a nearby town with close social or economic ties to the infected one. Doctors had no way to store human smallpox matter outside of a human body, so they relied on those with a mild case of the disease as living storage receptacles to begin the inoculation chain.59 Medical campaigns coupled mass inoculations with a significantly reorganized quarantine tailored to the geography of the affected area. When Tajumulco became infected, Cozar placed a quarantine ring around the town some sixty leguas in diameter “so that no one can leave or enter Tajumulco, and I continuously move [along this quarantine line] to make sure that everything is being maintained.”60 Additionally, Sargent Juan Santos Sanibal carried out regular reconnaissance through the ravines of Tajumulco on the Soconusco side, and Sargent Cornelio Chaves worked to “prevent the Indians from coming down to Soconusco during the epidemic.”61 Finally, nine “roving guards” (guardias volantes) traveled between Tajumulco and the nearby uninfected town of Tejutla in an attempt to prevent residents from moving between the two locations.62 During outbreaks, the cabildo building was the one place kept diseasefree, maintained by regular sulfur fumigation, a substance thought to prevent the spread of smallpox. No children could enter it under any circumstances as they were seen as the likeliest smallpox transmitters. That way the cabildo functioned as a safe zone where Indian alcaldes, parish priests, and visitors including colonial officials, smallpox workers, soldiers, mail carriers, and others could govern and monitor the epidemic. Everyone kept their baggage there as well—clothing, books, writing materials, and medicines—to lessen the chance that infected materials such as scabs would be carried to another town and perpetuate the epidemic.63 When smallpox arrived to a community, a military officer (most likely one of the military men enforcing the quarantines), local indigenous officials

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and elites, and the parish priest conducted a house-to-house inspection of the entire pueblo.64 From this inspection, these men compiled a census of all the town’s infants and children from newborns to young adults, that is, everyone in that community who had no previous exposure to the disease and so needed inoculation.65 Names could then be checked off as inoculation progressed to identify those who refused or fled. Militia soldiers and hired military men assisted health workers using coercion as needed to ensure that all who needed inoculation received it and to quarantine those in the town with natural and inoculation smallpox apart from those who remained healthy. To inoculate Indians, officials first assembled all the children, along with their parents, in the central plaza. That meant gathering everyone who had been born since the previous smallpox epidemic in 1780 or who did not have physical evidence such as scars that showed they had suffered from the disease and survived.66 Medical workers first cut off everyone’s hair, believing that this would make inoculation smallpox less painful and also because postinoculation caretakers used a medicinal wash called a lavoratorio on the smallpox pustules, including those located on the scalp, to promote healthy healing. This was easier to do with short hair. An eyewitness to the inoculations noted that “here the parents moaned at seeing them cut.”67 Flores’s guidelines had recommended hair-cutting for this purpose as well, especially for young women and girls with long hair.68 Given that inoculation was not a choice, but was imposed or even forced on Indian children, the parents’ response to their children’s hair being cut in preparation for inoculation created a tense situation that might necessitate force or threat of force to ensure order. Arm-to-arm inoculation began as soon as smallpox “of good quality” appeared. This meant inoculators used smallpox material extracted from the robust pustules of someone who had a less virulent case. This increased the likelihood of successful transfer of smallpox pus to another body. The inoculator did this by making a small cut using a lancet through the skin on either arm or between the index finger and thumb of the healthy recipient. Next he placed a finger over the cut and slowly removed the lancet, taking care to make sure that the pus remained embedded.69 No bandage or other material should have been placed over the cut while waiting until the blood or serum that seeped from the inoculation dried. That completed the procedure.70 Those persons who acted as pus donors remain invisible to us in the historical record for this antismallpox campaign. Flores’s updated treatment guidelines, Instruction for How to Practice Inoculation, continued to promote his alternative method, which he had

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originally proposed during the 1780 smallpox outbreak: the use of an insectbased poultice made from locally available beetles to raise inoculation blisters. He had developed this innovation by adapting insects with medicinal properties used in Mesoamerican medical cultures, and he included details in Protomedicato-sanctioned inoculation campaigns. The 1794 Instruction included further elaboration on the medicinal use of insects, now recommending that inoculators place the beetle-based poultice on each arm to increase the chance of generating a vigorous blister suitable for inoculation. About eight hours after the poultice application, blisters rose at the site, at which point the inoculator used scissors to cut each open, then inserted a bit of cloth well-soaked in smallpox pus. Flores asserted that “this method is certain to scare [Indian] children less.”71 The process concluded when the inoculator covered the opening with a medicinal plaster made from diapalma or a “yellow unguent” designed to dry the pustule, and then bandaged it. Caretakers regularly changed the dressing and kept the sore clean until it healed.72 The sources only approximate what Mayas individually and collectively thought about inoculation, responses that were mediated through descriptions written by colonial officials during heightened tensions brought on by epidemics, fear of catastrophic death, and the unfamiliar public health campaign procedures and medical instruments. The use of the beetle poultice had eliminated the need to utilize the lancet to transfer blood and smallpox material from one body to the other. That would have been an act that some Mesoamerican peoples associated with malevolent sorcery via the ritual penetration of the body’s boundaries with body fluids and parts to cast illnesses, such as blood, menstrual blood, and hair. Alcalde Mayor Chamorro described how in his experience, indigenous peoples in Totonicapán felt “repugnance” toward inoculation and considered the lancet an instrument of Spanish sorcery: “They [the Indians] shuddered to see the lancet, saying that we would kill their children with that procedure.”73 Indians also believed that the “lancet procedure [inoculation] was conducted using diabolical arts.”74 While we as modern readers might consider the association between inoculation and sorcery as further examples of Indian superstition and backwardness (as some of the Spanish did), Protomédico Flores took the issue of Mesoamerican medical cultures seriously. Other colonial officials did as well, including Francisco Chamorro, who noted that the native peoples in Totonicapán called inoculation “the Castillian remedy,” hinting that the highland Maya had their own medical responses to smallpox.75

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While the familiar beetle poultices and other leches de vegetales (“vegetal milks”) used in the region usually raised satisfactory blisters, Flores complained that this method sometimes produced sores that were difficult to cut open. For a further alternative to lancets, “the Indians can easily substitute their obsidian blades that they use for medicinal bleeding.”76 The chay, a knife or knifepoint crafted from obsidian or flint, Flores maintained, was a medical instrument that highland Mayas were familiar with. Using the chay to cut open smallpox pustules and transfer the mixture of blood and infected material, then, might additionally ease the introduction of inoculation. The concerns expressed by colonial medical campaigns about cutting instruments and blood shows a basic awareness of their ritual importance in Mesoamerican cultures. Blood acted as a symbolically power ful substance in Maya society, with multiple meanings and uses in Classic and Postclassic Era Mesoamerica. Ritual acts of cutting and bloodletting—of the self or war captives, for example—played key roles in public demonstrations of authority and legitimacy of a city- state’s ruling family. Selfbloodletting in this context was designed to keep the balance between the human world and the supernatural world of ancestors and gods, and male and female leaders both participated in these rituals. Bloodletting acts marked all-important occasions: marriage, accession to kingship, celebrating a successful battle, building dedications, and planting crops. The knife used in these rituals, commonly translated as “lancet” in English, acted as both an instrument for drawing blood and as a sacred object infused with power.77 Bloodletting in Maya ritual cultures also crossed into medical practice.78 Curandero sangradores were widely recognized in colonial society for their skills using cutting instruments and wet cupping. However, political, religious, and medical authorities saw such indigenous healers in general as ambiguous figures, on the one hand knowledgeable, especially in bloodletting, but also dangerous, as colonial discourses simultaneously linked Mesoamerican medical specialists and healing cultures to the use of sorcery and other diabolical arts. This quote from Bartolomé de las Casas in his monumental work Apologética historia sumaria nicely sums up this ambivalence in his comment on Maya medicine, which he encountered in colonial Verapaz: “They [the Indians] . . . had physicians, great herbalists, and perhaps even better sorcerers.” He observed the links between medical practice, herbal knowledge, and sorcery in Mesoamerican medical cultures.79 This sixteenth-century source depicting indigenous medical blood arts as sorcery provides a mirror image to Chamorro’s pronouncements that

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the native peoples of Totonicapán associated Spanish medical blood therapies with sorcery. And it further underscores the symbolics and practices of medical therapies involving blood as ritually charged across cultures in colonial Central America. Chronicler Francisco Ximénez hailed Mesoamerican knife technology as compared to Spanish cutting instruments, relating that Indian blades made from this material were so sharp that they “can cut off a horse’s head, as Bernal Díaz has told us. A Spaniard with his sword cannot even do this, even if he is very strong.”80 Chayes could be made from perdenal (a black flint) and obsidian, materials that had been extracted in Guatemala and fashioned into cutting instruments and bladed weapons since the Preclassic Era. Ximénez also lauded the superiority of the Mesoamerica chay over the European lancet for medicinal bleeding because of his own personal experience: “Here I advise counsel from twenty-five years of experience that I have, and that others have had, of not being bled with anything other than the chay.”81 Ximénez used the indigenous word for the medicinal cutting instrument instead of just collapsing it under the broad Spanish term “lanzeta” (lancet). This type of linguistic evidence shows that in colonial medical cultures, certain medical instruments and technologies remained categorized separately as “Spanish” or “Indian.” While Ximénez characterized his experiences with indigenous- style bloodletting and chayes positively, Spanish colonialism more broadly could associate bloodletting with Mesoamerican practices of human sacrifice, idolatry, and the occult, and this creeps into Ximénez’s assessment as well: “In ancient times Mayas made their lances, swords, arrow[heads], and sacrificial knives with [obsidian or black flint], opening a man in the center and removing the heart that they offered to their demons (demonios), and that here is commonly known as the devil’s knife (cuchillo del diablo).”82 The association of Maya cutting-blade technologies with human sacrifice was a way of simultaneously categorizing the chay as produced by an indigenous technology driven by the needs of human sacrifice and physical dismemberment. Nevertheless, Ximénez remained so impressed with ancient Mesoamerican cutting-blade technology that he had among his valued possessions an indigenous arrow point as an artifact “from those times, made from that stone, that is five fingers in length and it is a little wider than a lancet.”83 José Flores’s instruction that during inoculations “the Indians can easily substitute their obsidian blades that they use for medicinal bleeding” also indicates that he intended for both male and female Mesoamerican

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healers to practice inoculation in their communities as needed.84 Flores made this even more explicit in another section of the inoculation handbook, writing that he expected that any “able” ladinos and Indians to be taught how to inoculate. Priests would help identify these potential inoculators by pointing out to medical officials “the most capable ladinos or Indians to inoculate and care for the sick.”85 This dovetails with Ximénez’s assessment as well, when he wrote roughly a century earlier that “any Indian” could use Mesoamerican chayes for bloodletting: “This bloodletting method is so safe that any Indian can blood let, and most of them know how to do it, and it is a great example of their ability, because they are so rustic, and they do it so well, that among the Spaniards those [Indians] who are good blood letters are very respected.”86 The use of Indian and mixedrace inoculators as medical labor in colonial inoculation campaigns bears out in practice as well. Alcalde Chamorro informed the Crown that he taught inoculation to the Indians in Totonicapán: “Despite the Indians’ opposition to the lancet procedure and the fear they [the Indians] had [of it], I taught them the practice of inoculation, and in this way prevented hundreds of deaths.”87 Others agreed with the practical advantages of teaching Indians and other “able” persons to inoculate their own community members. In a letter to the Crown written in 1788, Don Nicolás Obregón, the alcalde mayor of the Partido of Amatitanes and Sacatepéquez in the Valley of Guatemala, had reflected on the successes of the 1780 inoculations and proposed teaching Indians to inoculate to spread the procedure further for when the next outbreak arrived. This indicates that colonial officials considered viable the strategy of teaching Indians to inoculate their own community members and that they saw at least some as capable of mastering the procedure. A return letter from the Crown enthusiastically supported this idea, agreeing that two licensed medical doctors be sent to Guatemala’s pueblos to teach inoculation to Indians, “adding how the Indians are skillfull enough to inoculate and experience its beneficial effects for themselves, [and] they will practice it on their own children, and in each pueblo they can attend these procedures and then after can be instructed in its practice.”88 Campaign doctors “can inoculate and instruct at the same time those Indians they recognize as having the best aptitude (disposición).”89 Note that the target inoculators are again a subpopulation of Indians characterized as “able” and “skilled.” We see this process of division again in that same letter as officials described other Indians from the same area as fieras or “wild beasts” for fleeing to the mountains to escape the smallpox epidemic.90 The idea then is to separate or distinguish between Indians who were teachable

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and cooperative with colonial authorities from those who refused, fled, or otherwise resisted smallpox campaigns. This type of assessment that divided indigenous populations was a typical part of public health campaigns in Guatemala as they moved from conceptualization and organization at the Audiencia and provincial levels to real-world application in local communities. Colonial medical campaigns looked to co-opt Indians who were willing to learn new medical techniques and apply them to others in their community, a similar process that officials used to compel Indians whose labor and geographic knowledge was needed to enforce quarantines and to police other Indians. This proved a time-tested strategy that established alliances with cooperative local Mayas and ladinos and mirrored strategies historically used by missionary priests in religious- conversion efforts at the local level: identifying those who, especially among the elite, were receptive to Christianity, and then using them as public examples in the hopes that others would follow suit.91 Flores additionally called for the central role of priests to help with inoculation campaigns by extending their religious caretaking roles to colonial medical campaigns.92 As a generally respected member of a community, the priest personally assisted the inoculation entourage “with the charitableness appropriate to his ministry, using persuasion, speaking to the Indians in their [Maya] language and with affection, to help them understand the goal of this protective care.”93 Parish priests acted as cultural and linguistic translators, communicating with Indian political leaders, elites, and lineage heads, as well as families with children who needed inoculation to support the goals of state-sponsored inoculation efforts. Accounts of the Totonicapán inoculations highlight the additionally important role of Indian women. One the one hand, women helped as cooperative participants in the inoculation campaigns, and on the other, they added a layer of Mesoamerican ritual practice to the procedure: “The mother (la madre) took the child in her arms and presented him to the mountains, burning much copal, asking the hills for the health of her child. Then she returned [with the child] to the church, asking that the patron saint of the pueblo save him from death.”94 The indigenous “mother” utilized both Maya and Christian cultural systems to ready the child for inoculation— the use of copal incense and appeals to a sacred landscape, coupled with prayers to the town’s patron saint. Her actions suggest the importance of her gendered role as caretaker and protector of the child through the inoculation process: “The mother knelt and bandaged the child’s eyes and turned the head away, and presented him to the inoculator, and that when the little Indian (yndito) felt the lancet’s incision and cried out, everyone at

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once repeated their threats.”95 The description also suggests that inoculations that took place in front of community members could become tense situations with the potential for violence. Here, a crowd present at a child’s inoculation became confrontational when the child cried out in pain from the inoculation. Who was “the mother”? She could have been the actual mother of each of the infants and children given inoculation. Or she may have a healer, a healer-midwife, or some other kind of medical-ritual specialist. Chamorro did not seem to have a problem with women’s participation and does not remark about it further. He did not label the rituals as “superstitious” or “backward,” showing, in this case, a strategic concession to Mesoamerican medical-ritual cultures for expediency’s sake. Flores had specifically envisioned a role for the mother in inoculation in his Instructions. Mothers provided gendered labor as they calmed and soothed their children during the inoculation and then stayed with them in the recovery spaces to nurse their children through inoculation smallpox.96 Ideally, inoculations took place in the casa del enfermo that functioned as a temporary or makeshift hospital set up in a community building, a house, or room in a house, organized “in the form of a hospital so that the children and their mothers are comfortable, with fresh air, cheerfulness, and ease, and this way [they] begin to inoculate.”97 After the procedure, each recipient remained there, quarantined from all contact with the community members, as they waited six to seven days for the arrival of the smallpox fever and staying until it ended and they were no longer contagious. Mothers nursed their children suffering from inoculation-induced fever and other symptoms.98 While mothers are specifically mentioned as participants in their children’s inoculation, fathers for the most part were not, a notable absence in the sources.99 We have seen a similar paternal absence during the conduct of postmortem cesareans, the other critical new biological intervention into colonial families and bodies in late eighteenthand early nineteenth- century Guatemala. In both cases, however, this absence does not mean that fathers were not present or involved. Despite the humanitarian purpose of the casa de enfermo as a place of curing, it also functioned as militarized space and as a kind of jail. Quarantine soldiers and other hired men guarded the building to ensure that those inside could not leave and to prevent others from entering, including concerned family members. Chamorro depicted it as a site of contention between residents and inoculation workers: “They proceeded to the casa del enfermo for the inoculation, and there a great confusion reigned, stirred up with loud voices and mixed with many tears; two thousand

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[Indians] threatened me if their children died.”100 Once inoculated children came down with the requisite smallpox fevers, for the most part they remained out of the control of their families and the treatment of indigenous healers, except in cases of infants and very young children. Some Indians’ fear that inoculation would kill their children, seen here and elsewhere, was not unfounded. This was not a completely safe procedure, and some did die from inoculation smallpox.101 Inoculators in highland indigenous communities kept careful records of challenges faced, variations in smallpox presentations, and mortality rates from both natural and inoculation smallpox for each community, and they sent this information to provincial authorities and to Protomedicato members in the capital. A typhus epidemic that broke out in this region at the same time had complicated inoculations and recovery chances.102 Significant organizational logistics arose when caring for hundreds of inoculation and natural smallpox cases in one town during an outbreak. Colonial medical campaigns needed to amass an extraordinary amount of labor to carryout inoculations and to care for those suffering from the disease. In San Pedro Solomá, officials arrived in time to inoculate all who needed it, 109 children and young adults, all of whom had to be nursed through inoculation smallpox on their way to becoming biologically immune to the disease. Things became more complicated in the much larger Q’anjob’al Maya town of Santa Eulalia, which had 1,555 infected infants and children, 122 with natural smallpox and 1,433 with inoculation smallpox. Jacaltenango recorded similar numbers, with 1,421 infected, 208 with natural smallpox and 1,213 with inoculation smallpox.103 Colonial medical workers would need to take over many buildings to adequately quarantine and house those with natural and inoculation-induced smallpox. The scale of medical work performed by inoculators is astonishing to our modern sensibilities, such as the surgeon who inoculated 631 children in Tajumulco alone.104 He was assisted in postinoculation care of patients by a “caretaker of the sick” (cuidador de los enfermos) who received a salary of two reales daily.105 To aid in the Totonicapán inoculations, Chamorro hired an unnamed maestro, described as “sufficiently intelligent,” who, while not a university-trained medical doctor, was deemed teachable and presumably had some medical experience. The maestro brought with him a medicine chest that contained all the “herbs and seeds” necessary to carry out the Protomedicato-sanctioned “curative method.”106 He earned a salary of twenty-five pesos per month, paid for by Indian community chest funds.107 Medical campaigns also needed to utilize labor from outsiders to assist inoculators, including caretakers, cooks, cleaners. They likely also

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relied on conscripted and voluntary labor from tributary Indian residents and relatives of the sick. Provincial authorities also hired extra military labor once inoculations began, leading to increased tensions between medical workers and local communities. When Cozar quarantined the smallpox-infected Indian children found in Tajumulco, he also immediately created a quarantine ring around the area, allowing no one to enter or leave. He stationed a military officer in the town inside the quarantine ring, and he stationed extra guards around it along the recently discovered Indian path and along the Camino Real.108 The Tajumulco quarantine provoked unrest among residents there, leading Cozar to respond by ordering the army officer in charge to patrol the town on foot “to prevent the Indians from rebelling once they found themselves quarantined.”109 Cozar paid for all of these services with slightly more than 359 pesos taken from the town’s community chest funds.110 Priests also performed medical labor in the casas del enfermo as the inoculated recovered. This is what Santa Eulalia’s parish priest Padre Don Juan Ambrosio Mata did, whom Chamorro praised as someone “who with much zeal and charity, is caring for the convalescence of the sick and working to heal the Indians; please credit him to the Archbishop for me.”111 Chamorro, who needed to leave town, left soldiers to guard the priest while he cared for the sick and to ensure the quarantine remained in place in his absence. Because Santa Eulalia at that time had slightly more than 1,500 residents with natural and inoculation smallpox, other local people must have been working as well, as one priest and two guards were not enough to care for them all. Santa Eulalia represented a particularly challenging situation for the inoculation campaign because residents faced medicine and food shortages in the town because of the quarantine, and because there was a general “lack of persons of reason and integrity who can be entrusted to carry out [Protomedicato-sanctioned treatments].”112 The need to have multiple groups quarantined separately further complicated matters. Residents who had no previous exposure to smallpox, but whose health was too precarious for inoculation, represented high risks for contracting and further spreading the disease. Those who could not be safely inoculated included pregnant women who had not yet suffered from smallpox and infants and weakened children “thin from worms” or teething with “much fever and bleeding.”113 Officials identified those who needed special treatment during the initial house-to-house inspection and inoculation census. These special cases would be quarantined separately in the parish priest’s house or in the house of another “trusted person.”114 According to the Instructions, the priest or Indian leader must carefully monitor

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this special quarantine house. To lessen the chance for smallpox transmission, only these “trusted persons” were allowed to deliver food and supplies to this group.115 Inoculation campaign workers and highland residents alike knew that smallpox caused pregnant women to miscarry. Thus, identifying pregnant women quickly was critical to colonial medical campaigns to provide appropriate treatment: “And because usually the heat of the [smallpox] fever causes dazedness and delirium, great care must be taken with the [pregnant] woman to frequently examine her so that if she does miscarry, the fetus (criatura) can be baptized, and the Padre Cura can provide the necessary instructions for how to [baptize miscarried fetuses].”116 The concern here appears to be less about the health of the woman and more about ensuring the baptism of a miscarried fetus during epidemics. The identification of pregnant women for special treatment during smallpox inoculation campaigns shows further evidence of how gender worked to construct relations of power enacted through colonial medicine utilized during epidemics. Inoculation workers treated females of reproductive age differently and interfered directly in their lives and the lives of their families if they were deemed pregnant or possibly pregnant. These policies that legitimized bypassing a male head of household’s authority to monitor and treat spouses and children were justified in terms of public health needs; they were also justified because the colonial state had a stake in ensuring that tributary Indian women reproduced a new generation of workers, and that in case of miscarriage or maternal death the fetus received baptism due to all colonial subjects. Smallpox inoculation campaigns and other antiepidemic efforts presented an unprecedented opportunity to increase the surveillance of women’s reproductive status throughout colonial Central America. Colonial authorities had repromulgated the original 1785 postmortem cesarean mandate again in 1791, part of the Audiencia’s increased focus on centralized public health efforts and antiepidemic campaigns during the 1790s.117 The colonial state formalized its intensified focus on pregnant women and their fetuses further through the circulation across the Audiencia of Protomedicato smallpox treatment guidelines that included reminders about postmortem cesarean mandates: “If, unfortunately, a pregnant woman dies [from smallpox], immediately notify the priest, lieutenant, and the [Indian] justices so that a barber or the most able man can conduct the cesarean in case this happens, according to the Instruction that the Audiencia has sent to all the highland governors and provincial leaders.”118 This meant that colonial medical campaigns additionally spread the knowledge and practice of

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postmortem cesareans to highland Maya communities during epidemic outbreaks. As a result, smallpox inoculation campaigns effectively intensified policing of women’s reproductive health. Physicians and other colonial personnel would have questioned family members, neighbors, and midwives about women of reproductive age sick with smallpox, or they might have conducted visual or even physical examinations of smallpox-inflicted women to identify pregnancies as part of the state- directed inoculation inspections and census. And they may have conducted postmortem cesareans on women in cases where pregnancy was only suspected, as cesarean guidelines recommended, and as we have seen take place in other instances. The increased attention to female pregnancy during epidemics simultaneously helped spread new colonial health policies to unborn fetuses. To quarantine women of reproductive age according to medical guidelines, public health officials not only needed to determine whether or not a woman was pregnant, but also the stage of a woman’s pregnancy. When inoculation workers quarantined women in their first months of pregnancy, “they [the women] should not be allowed to leave, not even to go to mass; exposure to natural smallpox of dangerous quality (mala calidad) causes great risk to their lives and the lives of their fetuses (criaturas).”119 Pregnant women close to delivery were quarantined until they had given birth and recuperated. If the risk of smallpox remained, officials inoculated both woman and newborn at the same time, and then cared for them together. Flores warned, however, that while an inoculated woman experienced the smallpox fever stage, she should not breast feed her infant. Officials needed to hire “another healthy woman” who could act as a wet nurse during that time.120 Young infants still breastfeeding also could be successfully inoculated, but special care needed to be taken when they, too, reached the smallpox fever stage because they tended to get pustules in their nostrils, “plugging them up and making it impossible for them to breathe while they suckle.”121 Prescribed treatments included carefully washing the scabs to keep them clean and promote healing. Once the dried scabs began to fall off, caretakers fed the infants “tamarind juice sweetened with sugar mixed with a bit of cañafistula to purge them” to promote a rapid recovery.122 Infants and children sick with worms or who had fevers and bleeding from teething formed the other at-risk group that could not be inoculated. They, like pregnant women, needed a separate quarantine space, remaining there until all traces of smallpox completely disappeared from the town. If they had

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improved or healed over the course of the quarantine, they could then be safely inoculated and cared for like the other infants and children.123 Those who came down with smallpox at the same time they had worms (gusanos or lombrizes) were described has having verminous smallpox (viruelas verminosas).124 Other complications during the fever stage of natural and inoculation smallpox necessitated bleeding by campaign workers. This is an example of the continued reliance by colonial medicine on therapies that had no proven beneficial effects. Treatment guidelines noted that pregnant women with smallpox should be bled to prevent miscarriage. For pregnant women with natural smallpox, medicinal bleeding commenced on both arms as soon as the fever began. When smallpox pustules appeared on the skin, she should again be bled, especially “if she feels pains in her uterus or in the hips, seeming as if she will miscarry.125 Bloodletting was thought to make the pustules harden and create scabs more quickly. Menstruating girls and young women, in Flores’s opinion, did not need to be bled in cases of high fever as long as “the blood flow is strong” because it seems that the physical act of menstruation had the same outcome as medicinal bloodletting on women’s bodies.126 Older children, twelve to fourteen years old, with natural or inoculation smallpox that included an especially serious fever also needed to be bled, as long as they were healthy enough to endure the procedure in the eyes of medical workers. The Instructions also recommended medicinal bleeding in cases of natural smallpox with or without typhus (viruelas malignas) when accompanied by an especially intense pustule breakout and painful aches in the head and waist.127 Children afflicted with smallpox sometimes also came down at the same time with perlesia, a paralysis and “loss of the senses.”128 If perlesia appeared, it did so at the same time that pustules began to form on the skin. Caretakers needed to take action, however, only in cases of “repeated and strong” perlesia, and they treated the symptoms with flor de borraga, a medicinal plant with blue or purple flowers “that grows abundantly in the countryside of the highlands.129 Here and elsewhere in the official Instructions, such attention to detail revealed the extensive knowledge that Flores and other medical physicians possessed not only about indigenous medical therapies and treatments but also of the availability of suitable, locally obtainable medicinal plants. Protomedicato guidelines included dietary recommendations for those afflicted with smallpox, here organized according to the three main geographic regions in Central America: the hot and humid coastal lowlands, the cold mountainous highlands, and the temperate zones, referred to

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respectively as tierra caliente, fría, and templada. How Flores and other medical physicians gained this knowledge is invisible to us. Yet this smallpox treatment guide, and others that targeted typhus, measles, and whooping cough, tailored convalescent diets as much as possible to epidemic outbreak area’s geographic location, natural environment, and widely available food and medicinal plants. Dietary recommendations for smallpox victims of the “warm lowlands” advised frequent use of local vegetables (verduras del país), including bananas and sweet potato. In contrast, those in highland pueblos would benefit from their well-known “inclinations for fruit,” including apples, perotes, and güisquiles. The Protomedicato additionally advocated chicken in various forms “because every pueblo has chickens” and because it was considered especially healthful to recuperating patients in broths, soups, or cooked in stews.130 The statement that “every” pueblo has chickens is interesting in itself for what it reveals about the spread of this European food source, its integration into indigenous economic activities and food cultures, and its cross- cultural association with healing qualities. Young children benefitted from chicken wings, legs, or tripe; older children should eat the other parts of the bird, eating moderately to avoid indigestion. If cooked into soups, caretakers mixed in orange or lime juice if available.131 Furthermore, “everyone everywhere,” according to the medicinal instructions, “drinks atole or chocolate for breakfast.”132 For those with smallpox, these drinks were also considered healthful as long as they were sweetened rather than spicy. In some towns, inoculation officials, priests, and Indian office holders provided medicinal alms to individuals and families to help with special food purchases and other expenses. As the epidemic raged in the Cuchumatanes during the summer of 1795, an entourage of Indian office holders that included the alcaldes, regidores, the choirmaster, and the town scribe, along with the priest of Soloma parish Domingo González, went house to house in Santa Eulalia distributing funds to assist those afflicted with smallpox.133 They provided four reales each to smallpoxafflicted residents on June 8, 19, and July 4, sometimes adding extra funds for the very poor.134 In the town of San Mateo Ixtatán, González accompanied the Indian office holders house to house, visiting the sick and their families, and distributing 100 tostones May 4, 1795; 140 tostones May 16; and 160 tostones May 25.135 Provincial and Audiencia officials did not, however, fund this monetary assistance. The medicinal alms came from each town’s community chest, so in reality the townspeople had paid for it themselves.136

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“A Great Work” In the aftermath of the inoculation campaigns, Alcalde Mayor Chamorro declared to Audiencia officials that “isolating the contagion to the said pueblo [of Tajamulco] has been a great work (una grande obra).”137 Colonial officials in the region—the priests, alcaldes mayores, corregidores, governors, and inoculation campaign workers—all emerged from the epidemic declaring that using inoculation and quarantines to save the Indians and prevent an Audiencia-wide smallpox outbreak was a “great work” medically and morally. One way officials made arguments asserting the success of the campaigns was by quantifying that success with postepidemic censuses that showed the extent that inoculation programs worked to prevent Indian deaths. Audiencia officials required provincial leaders to maintain detailed records of the medical campaigns that included pre- and postinoculation censuses and notations of mortality and blindness rates. Smallpox censuses quantified the public health programs’ success by the standards of modernizing colonial medicine, documented with statistics. Data from censuses additionally served to justify monies taken from town community chests, to track fluctuations in tributary Indian populations, and to decide whether that community deserved a reduction in taxes in the epidemic’s aftermath. The act of census-taking demonstrates another way that smallpox inoculation campaigns allowed for the spread of colonial authority and power to afflicted regions not only during the crisis but also after it ended. Inoculation censuses were new in the sense that their purpose was not just for taxation reassessments; for the first time, colonial authorities systematically documented exactly who had and had not been inoculated in each community. The censuses built on previous colonial policies and strategies that tracked local populations in colonial Guatemala by pueblo, especially tributary Indians, a group critically important to Audiencia and Crown wealth. Colonial authorities regularly took censuses counting tributary Indians and compared annual payments with these lists. Inoculation census-takers checked their lists with parish records—the Church had a tradition of keeping careful records of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths. Parish priests helped inoculation campaign workers identify from baptismal records newborns who needed inoculation. Some inoculation censuses included information on aberrations. Twentythree persons in Santa Eulalia contracted a fever but did not produce pustules from inoculations there. The inoculations in another eighteen children in Santa Eulalia produced not natural smallpox but instead aparatos

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erisipelatosis—a type of fever illness accompanied by inflammation of the skin of a deep red color.138 This inflammation eventually transformed into pus-filled abscesses at the inoculation location from which at least two children died.139 The Protomedicato eagerly sought out this type of information as they assessed inoculation anomalies that emerged in indigenous communities, information that they would use to adjust future medical campaigns. Postepidemic censuses had also occurred in the outbreak region during the 1780 epidemic, and so another way that provincial authorities made the case for the success of the 1790s campaigns was through a comparison of mortality rates between the two outbreaks. The 1780 epidemic and its high mortality rates remained fresh in everyone’s memory, especially in regions outside of the capital that had not used inoculations, and the low infection and mortality rates from the more widespread 1790s inoculations were impressive.140 Others made similar comparisons between the two epidemics. Fray Camposeco y Lorenzana, working in Jacaltenango curate towns, reflected that even though he applied the recommended antismallpox measures during the 1780 epidemic, they did not seem to have much effect. This time, they used the new “curative method” that included inoculation, “saving hundreds of tributary Indians from death.”141 Chamorro remained convinced that the use of inoculation, in addition to the already established strategies of quarantine and “medicines” (medicinas), greatly reduced the mortality rate and shortened the length of the epidemic.142 In another report to the Crown, Chamorro wrote that while the 1780 epidemic “had annihilated Los Huistas,” and that this epidemic had also threated a similar terrible outcome, this did not come to pass “due to His Majesty’s most zealous actions to care for the many pueblos under his protection,” especially inoculation.143 Reports written by medical and political officials describing community responses to inoculation speak to the broader goals of biologically integrating Indians into the new medical goals of empire. Some Indian communities were portrayed as having the ability to overcome their suspicion or fear of smallpox inoculation after seeing the benefits in the results—that most inoculated children survived the epidemic. In Chiapas, provincial governor Quentas y Zayas noted that “once the Indians recognized the successful results of inoculation, they brought their breastfeeding infants to be treated, thereby inoculating infants as young as twelve days old.”144 Alcalde Mayor Chamorro saw for himself such a transformation as the epidemic wound down in one highland town in Totonicapán: “They [the Indians]

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received me [by] ringing bells and throwing flowers, showing me that the smallpox scars that marked the body [of those convalescing] had been few, raising their hands to heaven, and in their crude fashion gave thanks to the King for saving the lives of their children.”145 Chamorro reflected that in Totonicapán, even though more than 1,000 adults in the five pueblos suffered from typhus and other diseases that accompanied this same peste [smallpox], the inoculator happily cured them with the medicines he brought with them and administered to appropriately treat them, so that now that the Indians have had a positive experience with one or another [medical] treatment, they have overcome their repugnance.146

Fray Camposeco Lorenzana, in Jacaltenango parish, agreed, observing that when Chamorro returned in November to make sure the epidemic had indeed been extinguished in the towns along the Camino Real, “some of the Indians in my curate thanked him with gifts of chickens and other things, as was their custom.”147 These experiences provided examples to other colonial officials of how to ensure continued access to indigenous bodies and the bodies of other colonial subjects through colonial medical campaigns. Other reports described exceptional Indians and their communities as a kind of idealized vision of colonial indigenous subjects remade through the promise of colonial medicine and inoculations. In the midst of the epidemic in Totonicapán province, the Indian alcaldes, lineage heads, and elders from the town of San Juan Ixcoy wrote a letter to the president of the Audiencia.148 To date the town had remained uninfected, nevertheless Chamorro had set up a precautionary militarized quarantine guard post there because of the town’s strategic location as the gateway to the larger cities of the province and ultimately to the Audiencia capital.149 In the letter, San Juan Ixcoy leaders notified the president that they had agreed to comply with the antiepidemic requirements because of their observations of high smallpox death rates in a neighboring town: “The epidemic struck our neighbors in San Mateo [Ixtatán] as a wildfire that has burned everything.”150 Town officials saw for themselves that inoculation there reduced smallpox deaths, comparing the survival rate with inoculation during this epidemic with the death rate without inoculation during the 1780 epidemic: “We know that if we follow these remedies, not as many of Our King’s [Indian] tributaries will die as before.”151 This offer of cooperation by one tributary Indian town shows the operation of Mesoamerican lineage

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authority during epidemics and how inoculations provided opportunity for some Indian elites to make strategic alliances with colonial medical campaigns to protect their community during epidemics if they considered the treatments beneficial. The president of the Audiencia, José Domas y Valle, replied with his own letter, praising Ixcoy leaders for having obeyed his antiepidemic orders: “I am very happy with the good judgement that you show to allow the application of inoculation remedies by doctors and physicians that I have ordered to save your children from death.”152 The fact that the president took the time to write such a response further underscores the importance of cultivating alliances with Indian elites where possible to ensure the success of inoculations and quarantines. The president’s return letter was sent in a very public way, designed to be observed and discussed in San Juan Ixcoy and in the neighboring pueblos of the afflicted region. The letter first went to the cabildo, where Maya elites and lineage heads had gathered to receive it. Then the letter was transported with much fanfare to the home of the first alcalde. According to Chamorro, “they [the Indian officials] understood your kind words and gave great demonstrations of thanks, then kissed [the letter] and held it over their heads. To the sound[s] of flutes and drums, [and] yelling many vivas [in your honor], they carried [the letter] . . . to the home of the primer alcalde.”153 The letter’s delivery offered a public display of respect toward Indian leaders for their open offer of cooperation, even as the inoculation campaigns ramped up in that area. The first alcalde returned that respect by storing the letter with the town’s other important documents: “[The first alcalde] had a chest (una arca) where he gathered the [town’s important] documents, including the land titles (títulos de tierras) and other priviledges (privilegios), and he placed the [President’s] letter there.”154 The payoff for this attention to detail for Audiencia and provincial authorities was that these same Indian elites became allies of the colonial inoculation campaign. They not only agreed to allow doctors and medical personnel to inoculate their residents, they also patrolled daily the strategically important road leading from Ixcoy to the main cities in the province and from there to the Audiencia capital. Furthermore, town residents did not simply feign cooperation. Ixcoy patrols captured and impounded several cargos of goods coming from infected areas.155 When colonial officials considered the stark numbers and what must have seemed like incredible survival rates for native peoples compared to previous epidemics, they then began to generalize its beneficial effects for “the public” and for “humanity.” Fray Domingo González, a Mercedarian

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in charge of the curate of Solomá, reinforced this theme that the methods and costs of the inoculation campaigns were justified for “the public good” (el bien público).156 Indians now formed part of the public and the humanity that Chamorro and other colonial officials envisioned. Inoculations were also important to ensure the continued success of the colonial project, or as Chamorro put it, “for the benefit of humanity and the Real Hacienda.”157 Part of Chamorro’s humanitarian vision, one that expressed similar pronouncements on the subject as other colonial authorities, emphasized that the lower mortality rates also benefitted the Real Hacienda, which, as part of its responsibilities, regulated and maintained the lucrative tributary system in the Spanish empire. Many also praised what they considered the inoculation campaign’s humanitarian method despite the widespread use of soldiers and militiamen. Fray José Camposeco y Lorenzana, reporting from Jacaltenango, explicitly described the introduction inoculation to the Indians of Jacaltenango using humanitarian language: Alcalde Mayor Chamorro, “with great zeal and charitableness, and using gentle reasoning, consoled all of these poor ones [the Indians], explaining to them, the loving inexhaustible charitableness with which you [the President of the Audiencia] love them, and sought to save them with inoculation.”158 The humanitarian language used here that stressed the importance of medically saving Indians relied on reminiscent language used by priests caring for indigenous parishioners and the Spanish Crown’s paternalistic protection of its vassals over the course of the colonial period, but this time it was used to justify inoculation. This shows that discourses of saving the Indians medically drew on established colonial discourses of saving Indians’ souls with Christian conversion. Chamorro used similar humanitarian language when he arrived in Jacaltenango to begin the inoculation to the Indians there. He ordered that the Indian justices and lineage heads gather together, and he told them that he had come “desiring to save their children from death and to save the tributary Indian towns, [therefore] I ordered inoculators and medicines (bótica) to heal them.”159 While many hoped that humanitarian, nonviolent methods of inoculation could be used, at the same time sources show how colonial officials also called inoculation efforts reducciones (reductions), a term used during the conquest and colonial periods to describe a strategy to organize dispersed Indian communities, oftentimes forcibly, into one town under the control of a parish priest or missionary friar to aid in religious conversion and the imposition of tribute taxes in newly conquered regions. During the introduction of militarized quarantines and forced smallpox inoculations

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in the mid-1790s, colonial public health campaigns reimagined and deployed this concept through colonial medicine.160 Fray González, the Mercedarian friar in charge of Solomá parish, referred to the antiepidemic campaigns as reducciones apestados (“reductions of the infected ones”).161 When he wrote about the challenges faced inoculating in San Mateo Ixtatán because of opposition there, he noted that it was not possible for them to “reduce them” (reducirlos), again referring the colonial policy of reducción.162 Amid these characterizations of success, there were also indications that the introduction of inoculation to Mayas in Guatemala’s highlands was a hard-fought battle that was perhaps not as successful as portrayed in postepidemic reports to the president of the Audiencia and to the Spanish Crown. Mesoamerican medical practitioners and those who sought their care at times disrupted colonial medical narratives of successful inoculation; furthermore, these disruptions can be read in the same sources that touted its successes. Colonial authorities collapsed Mesoamerican medical therapies together under the category “barbarous customs.” Updates provided by alcaldes mayores and missionary priests in charge of Indian pueblos frequently used terms that described the difficulty medically treating Indians because the “Indians are as stubborn as they are superstitious, and they are addicted to their customs.”163 Chamorro, overseeing inoculation in Santa Eulalia, the largest town in the curate of Solomá at that time, expressed frustration in a similar way: “Of those who were not inoculated, one-fifth have died, and we are hampered by their barbarous customs.”164 San Mateo Ixtatán residents proved particularly resistant to inoculation because of undescribed “abuses” there.165 Those who resisted smallpox inoculation and the curative method must, according to Chamorro, “be dissuaded from [using] their foul customs, in order to save thousands of tributary Indians and ensure that the contagion spreads no further.”166 Here the sentiment is clear: Indians should be saved despite themselves, for their own good and for the public good. Chamorro even referred to an uprising in San Juan Ixcoy in response to the forced inoculations, though unfortunately with no details: “San Juan Ixcoy, that large pueblo of barbarous Indians, rose up against me, a victim of their furor, after some 300 of the first inoculated [residents] had died.”167 President Domas y Valle made blanket pronouncements in reports to the Crown that all the Indian pueblos treated by the inoculations campaigns “are inclined to sedition and disturbances.”168 He additionally observed in his postepidemic assessment to the Crown “that the abuses of the Indians were, in reality, more noxious that the epidemic.”169 Some of these so-called abuses and barbarous customs included treating smallpox with heat by

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bringing the sick person close to the fire during the fever stage. Many workers felt that the deaths from inoculations occurred when the Indians would not give up “that barbarous custom that they have of bringing them [the inoculated] close to the fire.”170 Flores was also well acquainted with indigenous medical therapies that treated smallpox with heat. His Instrucciones mandated that the inoculated instead should be dressed in light clothing and left to recover in buildings with access to fresh air through open windows. Frequent complaints of Indian treatment of smallpox with heat—as with similar Mesoamerican treatments of typhus with heat— by wrapping the sick in extra clothing and blankets, placing them near fires, or bathing in medicinal hot springs or temascales not only made value judgments that indigenous medicine caused rather than cured illness, but also showed that Mesoamerican specialists did indeed practice medicine in smallpox-afflicted communities concurrently with public health campaigns.171 We can read something of the nature of the resistance to the antismallpox campaigns in the numbers reported by Chamorro for Ixtatán, which showed a higher number of infected children with natural smallpox in the town (464) than the number of those infected by inoculation smallpox (140). This suggests that significant numbers caught natural smallpox before inoculation campaigns arrived, refused inoculation, or avoided it through subterfuge or flight.172 Correspondence between Ixtatán’s parish priest and Chamorro explicitly mentioned temascal as a significant impediment that they encountered introducing inoculation in that area, “and principally the alcalde mayor comissionado (Chamorro) separated all of them from the use of the temascales.”173 Colonial officials here and elsewhere accomplished this by destroying temascales in the highlands as part of their effort to impose the Protomedicato’s “curative method.” While the Audiencia-mandated smallpox method was flexible enough to allow medicinal beetles, Mesoamerican chayes, and “able” Indian inoculators, this flexibility did not extend to temascales, presumably because colonial officials had no access to those buildings and practices and did not seem to have a method of co-opting them into the public health campaigns. Even so, Francisco Chamorro, so vexed by the challenges faced inoculating in Totonicapán, still advocated treating Indians with compassion: “I have painted this picture for Your Majesty to give you an idea of the barbarity of the Indians and their lack of polish, assuring you that to see and hear them causes [both] horror and compassion for their soul, body, and manner of dress, and [that] they are worthy of compassion.”174 As we will see in the next chapter, these tensions between compassion and coercion will

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intensify with the introduction of the Jenner vaccine to Central America, as humanitarian discourses that framed state- directed antismallpox campaigns increasingly relied on coercive colonial processes in attempts to reach the goal of vaccinating all colonial subjects throughout the Audiencia.

chapter five

“This Marvelous Fluid”

When English medical physician Edward Jenner developed what became known as the smallpox vaccine in the 1790s, he built on observations that he and others had made that men and women who milked and cared for cows with cowpox sometimes caught the disease themselves, and in the process gained immunity to smallpox.1 Many immediately recognized the vaccine’s potential, describing cowpox as “this marvelous fluid,” using the language of miracle cures and scientific discovery.2 Vaccine proponents in Guatemala considered the discovery of cowpox’s antismallpox properties a major historical turning point, one that “announced to the world that such a simple procedure in practice could be so portentous in its effects, leaving the human species protected from the scourge of smallpox. A yearning to participate in this heavenly discovery emerged among all types of people in Guatemala.”3 The central importance of cows as the producers of this marvelous fluid became apparent to supporters as well, leading Protomédico José Flores to gush: “[Cowpox] is a sweet pus, provided by the most useful animal to man.” 4 To this, he added that “it is an antidote that the happiest doctor finds in the countryside in humble pastures; it is a gift from Providence.”5 When news arrived in Central America of the vaccine’s discovery, medical, scientific, political, and religious elites were poised to integrate the procedure into its public health efforts. They took advantage of the knowledge circulations that characterized Enlightenment medical cultures to learn how to vaccinate, adjust the vaccine’s application to the challenges posed by its multiethnic colonial populations, conduct experiments 165

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on humans and animals with the fluído vacuno or pus vacuno (cowpox vaccine) to aid in its propagation, and develop new storage technologies to ensure reliable, transportable supplies that could be deployed as needed. The enthusiasm for the vaccine emerged within the context of four decades of colonial medical campaign experience that centered on the importance of public health to Audiencia governance. Yet the embrace of the Jenner vaccine by elites in Central America was not exceptional; instead, it was similar to other impor tant places in the Americas at this time. Protomedicato authorities and leading physicians and scientists working in the Audiencia engaged in frequent contact with their peers in the Americas and Europe about the vaccine, exchanging information in letters, “how to” guides, articles on their findings in the leading newspapers, and in books and pamphlets produced by Audiencia publishing houses. Medical experimentation is an impor tant part of the history of the Jenner-vaccine era in Central America. Its discovery unleashed an unprecedented wave of experiments with human smallpox, cowpox, and other pustular diseases conducted on humans and animals alike, activities explicitly sanctioned and promoted by Audiencia and Protomedicato authorities. Participants in experimental medical cultures included not only licensed doctors, but also aficionados and other interested laypersons with no formal training. Guatemala’s Enlightenment medical cultures allowed for, and in certain instances encouraged, this participation in the new technologies and procedures of the era, including inoculation, postmortem cesareans, and the new antityphus cures. The practice continued with vaccination and associated experimental activities in animals and humans, part of an emphasis at the time on the importance of certain learned “rational” lay persons— be they unlicensed doctors, aficionados, priests, indigenous peoples, or women—who formed a significant component of Guatemala’s Enlightenment cultures and who actively participated in the spread of new and adapted medical technologies and practices.6

Circulating Cowpox and Smallpox Pus Guatemala’s efforts to obtain cowpox fluid for vaccinations took on a particular urgency in April 1802, when reports of smallpox outbreaks in Chiapas, the Petén, and the districts of Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango reached the Audiencia court and the Protomedicato in Nueva Guatemala. Officials worried that this outbreak would be severe because most of

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the region had not experienced a smallpox epidemic since 1780. The smallpox outbreak during the 1790s had remained largely confined to specific highland towns amid the Audiencia-directed inoculation campaigns using smallpox matter undertaken there.7 This helped set in motion a concerted effort among a significant core of Guatemala’s colonial elites and literate residents to generate widespread public support for Jenner’s vaccine, many of whom expressed their views in print in the Gazeta de Guatemala.8 As a result, work had already begun to bring cowpox samples to Central America and develop a domestic vaccine supply at least eighteen months before November 1803, when the Crown-sponsored Royal Smallpox Vaccination Expedition left the port of La Coruña in Spain and headed for the Americas.9 The spring outbreak led to another round of centralized antiepidemic planning. José Córdova, who now led the Protomedicato, set up a medical committee (junta) comprising the Audiencia’s leading doctors to manage the official epidemic response.10 Because Guatemala did not yet have the cowpox vaccine in 1802 and would not manage to obtain a definitive live sample and successfully vaccinate until May 1804, the Protomedicatodirected campaigns continued to rely on strategic inoculation coupled with quarantines, initially deployed by colonial authorities during the 1780 outbreak and refined during the 1794–95 inoculation campaigns in the Maya- dominated highlands.11 The idea was that once the Protomedicato acquired the cowpox vaccine and created a reliable supply, vaccination could be substituted relatively quickly and smoothly using public health networks already in place.12 The junta organized quarantines, inspections, and reporting chains between the capital and infected regions. These chains could then quickly be transformed as needed into the core structure of an inoculation campaign at an outbreak site. Alcaldes mayores and jueces de la carrera, officials who monitored travel between their jurisdictions and the capital, acted as regional coordinators and created a ring of quarantine lines in the districts of Suchitepéquez, Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, Sololá, and Verapaz to protect the capital and the rest of the Audiencia from the stricken towns.13 In cities like Nueva Guatemala, alcaldes de barrio monitored the residents in their sector by conducting house-to-house inspections, making observations as to what type of smallpox they found, and assessing its virulence. Protomédico Córdova dispatched members of the medical junta, all licensed medical doctors or students in training at the medical school at the University of San Carlos, to towns outside of the capital to monitor suspected smallpox cases.14

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The centralized response also included efforts to obtain the latest information on the new procedure and a vaccine sample, demonstrating the global connections of Central America’s Enlightenment medical cultures. As the Gazeta de Guatemala reported, “Perhaps no other country (país) has desired [the cowpox vaccine] with more impatience.”15 Protomédico Córdova and Narcisco Esparragosa worked to raise money to obtain the vaccine fluid and bring it to Guatemala, organizing an informal coalition of university professors and doctors, elite intellectuals, businessmen, and colonial and royal authorities who contributed money for this international search for cowpox.16 Over the coming months, this search would obtain the latest information about the Jenner vaccine available in the form of new vaccination handbooks, reports from scientific societies, correspondence from their regional, hemispheric, and transatlantic contacts, and, eventually, the vaccine itself.17 On April 25, 1802, the junta’s donated funds paid for a special mail delivery to Mexico City and the port city of Veracruz, where the Protomedicato had information that a vacuna supply had recently arrived, carried from Spain on the ship Argonauta.18 The mail delivery, however, returned without the vaccine; it had degraded during its transatlantic journey, a common problem. This was only the first of many attempts made by members of Guatemala’s medical, political, and economic elites to acquire live cowpox fluid.19 More samples would follow, not only from Mexico but also Spain, Havana, and New Orleans.20 When vaccine samples arrived, they were tested on children, including children of elite men who had contributed the funds to obtain vacuna fluid.21 Though Mexican contacts had no live vaccine fluid to send on to Guatemala at that time, they did send two newly published French-authored vaccination manuals: one sent by the governor of Veracruz to the president of the Audiencia, the other from botanist José Marino Moziño to his friend Alejandro Ramírez.22 Both men then forwarded the manuals to Esparragosa, who proceeded to share them with other medical doctors in the capital.23 By late June, the Gazeta promised its readers that “with this, we now have [in Guatemala] three sets of instructions on how to conduct a vaccination with cowpox, and we will pick the best written and publish it in its entirety in this newspaper, after Esparragosa and the other medical doctors are ready to inform the public of the results of their continuing observations and experiments.”24 Not only did medical faculty and interested parties in the capital use their connections to doctors in other cities in the Americas in their attempts to acquire live cowpox, scientists and physicians elsewhere in Central

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America used their contacts as well. Tomás Urdiroz, working in Trujillo in what is now Honduras, wrote to José Ledesma, a professor of medicine in Havana, asking for updates about Ledesma’s attempts to obtain cowpox. Urdiroz then forwarded that correspondence to the Gazeta de Guatemala along with a set of vaccination instructions that Ledesma had sent him. The Gazeta printed this helpful information, concluding that “he who is first to acquire the pus will be, without a doubt, performing the greatest service to the Audiencia. We offer a public thanks to Urdiroz, Ledesma and the many others who are trying to acquire [the cowpox vaccine for Guatemala].”25 Faced with the lack of cowpox among Central America’s cattle herds and the initial failures of obtaining vacuna samples from Mexico, the Protomedicato innovated, with the Audiencia’s full support. They developed a plan to harvest epidemic smallpox fluid from afflicted children and young men and women from the outbreak towns in Chiapas that struck during the 1802 season. This “seed” as it was sometimes called—human smallpox pus— would then be transported and stored in the capital, ready to be reanimated in case of a catastrophic outbreak. Aware of the dangers involved in delivering epidemic smallpox from one region of the Audiencia to another, officials carefully planned the transportation scheme using the latest vaccine storage technologies adapted to the needs of a difficult overland transport by horseback through mountainous terrain: Finally it is necessary to store the [smallpox] seed for hopeless case[s] when a general inoculation must be conducted. Send a special mounted mail delivery to the interim Governor [of Chiapas] in Ciudad Real. Medical professionals and aficionados there will drench six pounds of cotton thread of medium weight with smallpox [pus] from well-formed and developed pustules, [taken] from the bodies of Spaniards or Indians, [and] place it in welded cans made from thin sheets of tin, [that are] lined with a bull’s bladder.26

No reason was given, however, for why the sample smallpox had to come from Spaniards or Indians only, and not mestizos or blacks. In contrast to smallpox, cowpox was not dangerous or lethal to humans, so transportation technologies for this material were more focused on protecting it from the elements, including light. According to the French-authored vaccination manuals sent to Guatemala during this time, there were three safe ways of preserving the vaccine fluid and sending it

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long distances: on thread, on a lancet that had been used to pierce a robust cowpox pustule, and dried between two glass panes. To reanimate the dried cowpox fluid, vaccinators added water drop by drop “until the material acquires a syrupy consistency” and could then be used to vaccinate.27 The safest method, asserted the French authors, was to place the fluid between two pieces of glass pressed together and sealed around the edges with wax. To send epidemic smallpox, the Protomedicato built on this storage technology and made some significant modifications. They added a welded metal can as an extra layer of protection that not only would block the light from entering, but also provided a more secure seal to prevent any contagious material from escaping. A bull’s bladder offered an additional waterproof barrier to contain the smallpox pus during the overland trip from Chiapas to the capital.28 The smallpox sample traveled from Ciudad Real to the capital without incident.29 This effort to shore up stores of human smallpox matter in case of mass outbreak showed how Audiencia medical authorities now prepared in advance for their occurrence and spread.

“Original Experiments” with Animals and Humans The delivery from the governor of Chiapas included a second similarly prepared smallpox container. The Protomedicato planned to distribute this material to those interested in conducting experiments on animals: This little can of smallpox will garner much interest, namely, that the [human] smallpox pus from Ciudad Real will be injected into ewes (ovejas), thereby sowing the vaccine, because we have not had the good luck to locate [cowpox] among the cows or sheep in this vicinity, nor further away, no matter how much we rushed our efforts. Immediately we intend to conduct original experiments, founded on so perfect an analogy, thus it seems success is guaranteed.30

By the spring of 1802, the Audiencia and the Protomedicato had already sent their agents into the field in and around the capital and to other regions to inspect cows for cowpox. Inspectors had not found any, so the Audiencia supported experimenting with animals by introducing human smallpox into their bodies to induce the disease that, it was hoped, would have the same antismallpox properties as cowpox.31 With the outbreak that year, matters became fraught, leading the state- directed antismallpox

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campaign to expand inspections from cows and ewes to also include horses and mules.32 Establishing a domestic supply would depend on keeping animals sick with cowpox so that workers could continually extract pus for vaccinations. At the same time that the Protomedicato began distributing smallpox samples for animal experiments, its doctors spread information about how cowpox presented on the bodies of cattle in correspondence with alcaldes mayores of the Audiencia’s provinces and their lay representatives in the field. This information also was circulated to Guatemala’s literate public to increase the chance that someone might recognize cowpox in their own cattle herds. Cowpox appeared on the udder’s teats (tetas) or nipples (pezones) in the form of irregular shaped pustules that had a pale bluish or dark bluish-gray color.33 They initially produced a thin, watery, acrid discharge that became thicker over the course of the sickness. The skin surrounding the pustules then became swollen, hardened, and inflamed. It was best to extract cowpox for vaccination use “when the discharge on the udder is the most active.”34 Curanderos de las vacas (cattle healers) noted that if left untreated, the pustules transformed into “profound ulcers that wear away and destroy the flesh.”35 Healers cured cowpox by applying “a strong or corrosive metallic solution, such as white or blue sulfuric acid.”36 The disease was not fatal to cows, and only spread to humans when they came into direct contact with the pus through cuts or abrasions on their hands or fingers. Cowpox did not easily spread between cows or from herd to herd.37 Cows with cowpox could be identified by observable behavioral changes well, described as a “general malaise” with decreased appetite and diminished milk production. A Gazeta article attributed these changes in the cow to the pain the disease caused when she was milked and not to the disease itself and its physiological effects. Cows regulated their own milk flow, specialists claimed, providing more or less depending on the amount of pain that animals felt.38 Cows in pain from untreated cowpox purposefully withheld milk: “With respect to the event that [the cow] produced less milk, it may be due in part to the pain caused to the animal’s teats, because the cow has voluntary dominion over her milk, and can provide more or less milk each time. This fact is well known among large herds of cattle, that the person who has soft, rather than harsh, milking hands obtains more milk from the same teat.”39 Tying a cow’s milk production to “voluntary dominion” attributes intent to the animal and stresses the importance of the human-animal relationship to ensure strong milk production. There are echoes here of ideas expressed in medical humanitarianism that Indians

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should be treated gently as part of inoculation or other antiepidemic campaigns because the goal, in part, was to ensure the continued production of labor and goods from tributary Indian pueblos. During the early fall of 1802, the Gazeta added to information about cows, their connections to human health, and details about how to recognize the disease by excerpting and translating information from an English-language vacuna compendium that the Protomedicato had recently obtained.40 There were multiple causes of pustular illnesses in cows caused by its interaction with human and other species, “especially those that cause irritation to these organs [when the milker] most forcefully produces milk. Bites from flies or mosquitos, or the rough treatment of these [organs], and other external irritations of these sorts many times [also] cause blisters (ampollas) or small white pustules (vegigas) on these parts.”41 An udder that is left swollen too long with pustules eventually cannot be milked, which results in “copious outbreaks [of pus] on the udder and teats.”42 The material discharged from the ulcers imparted that same “pustular disorder in the hands of the milkers if their skin is broken, and often results in extensive ulcers on their arms and shoulders, that feel uncomfortable and are difficult to cure.”43 Disease transfer between animals and humans produced similar symptoms in both—pus-filled lesions on the skin at point of contact between human and cow.44 Even though the cowpox vaccine depended on harvesting pus from sick cows, the Gazeta made it clear to its readers that nevertheless cows were essentially “healthy”: “The cow in general is a very healthy animal (un animal muy sano), but it is subjected to some peculiar sicknesses, many of them likely due to its domestication and intimate connection to man.” 45 This might have been part of a strategy to allay fears about the intentional transfer of infectious material from animals to humans. These and similar writings reflect the circulation of Enlightenment ideas regarding cross-species disease transfer that, during this era of animal experimentation, began to spread through the Audiencia as well. In the report Protomédico Flores sent to the Spanish Crown in February 1803 in support of the Royal Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, he described multiple waves of fruitless inspections of domestic herds and animal experiments with smallpox: “They have ceaselessly searched for cowpox; they have this animal all over [the Audiencia of Guatemala]. Not finding the virus (el virus), one Doctor Córdova proposed original experiments inoculating ewes.”46 The phrase “original experiments” was used at this time to emphasize that smallpox experiments began among participants in Guatemala’s own medical cultures though their efforts were tied

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to broader experimental cultures with animals and pustular diseases in the Americas and Europe that characterized the Jenner vaccine era.47 Like Guatemala, other regions could not find cowpox among their cattle, including Cuba. The editors of the newspaper La Aurora de Havana reported that “there is absolutely no cowpox on that Island [of Cuba], . . . but they are continuing to search for cowpox among their cows and by other methods,” showing the ways that other cities in Spain’s empire also used multiple strategies to obtain the vaccine before the expedition’s arrival to the Americas.48 The search for cowpox among Audiencia herds was referred to as the Cattle Project (El Proyecto de las Vacas).49 The project’s activities included geographically wide-ranging cowpox inspections as well as field experiments on animals and humans with biological material found during those inspections to test its antismallpox properties. Audiencia and Protomedicato officials directed these efforts, coordinating with regional and local political and medical authorities, lay workers, and cattle owners.50 Cowpox inspectors and Protomedicato-sanctioned doctors with knowledge of the properties of domestic animals, animal pox, and smallpox, or had inoculation experience, performed this labor. They inspected herds, followed rumors and tips, and tested humans with any promising cowpox- or smallpox-like material that they found on the animals. They also had the authority to inject cattle, sheep, and other animals with human smallpox in attempts to induce cowpox that could then be used as a vaccine, referred to as “sowing the vaccine” as a farmer might sow his field to produce corn.51 During 1803, licensed medical physician Toribio de Carbajal traveled to “various haciendas” inspecting cattle herds “with no other objective other than to inspect cows to find infectious materials on their bodies [suitable] for inoculation.” Carbajal received word from the Marqués de Aycinena of a cowpox outbreak among his herds in the Fraijanes area.52 Carbajal traveled there, and indeed found cows with what he believed to be cowpox, “and made some inoculations with it.”53 The doctor’s inspection circuit and correspondence with the Marqués shows the operation of local, regional, and Audiencia-wide networks used to identify cowpox among Guatemala’s herds. Cowpox inspectors who experimented in the field included not only licensed medical doctors like Carbajal but also interested laypersons experienced with inoculation. Juan de Molina had inoculation experience gained during the earlier epidemics. In the interim, however, he had fallen on hard economic times and currently worked as a cowpox inspector.54 During the fall of 1803 and the winter of 1804, Molina traveled through Totonicapán

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province, noting that “it appears to me that all over this kingdom many are looking for [cows] that have [cowpox].”55 One day, Molina and Mariano Larrave, a representative of the Protomedicato, were inspecting cattle at the hamlet of San Antonio Lacal and found cows with promising pustules among those owned by Molina’s uncle, Don Santiago Molina: “They had found a cow with pustules (granos), and they used the material to inoculate those who had not yet suffered from smallpox, and this proved useful and successful . . . this inoculation produced a very favorable type of smallpox.”56 The men agreed that the animal’s body showed “signs” (señales) that it would soon produce more pustules, as did other cows in the herd. Molina quickly penned a letter to Totonicapán’s alcalde mayor, Prudencio Cozar, notifying him of the news that they thought they had found pustules on cows with fluid that, based on their experiments, appeared to be cowpox.57 Cozar informed Audiencia President Antonio González, who then asked Molina and Larrave to investigate further.58 On February 11, 1804, Molina updated Cozar, telling him that he decided not to continue his inspections along “the coast” because the cattle there no longer had any granos; instead, he would remain at San Antonio Lacal where two of the cows there currently had some. Their pustules appeared as “white blotches” (manchas blancas), but they had already matured and were drying up. Molina sent a package of pus and scab samples from the animals to Cozar, explaining that he did so “so that you can see if some experiments can be done with them.”59 Molina asked that the alcalde mayor provide funds so that special care could be taken with the cattle because despite their promising bout of pustules, they were not well cared for and were still being used as pack animals: “I will rejoice when [vaccination with cowpox] is put into practice, and I ask that you order that the cattle be well cared for, and especially that they be allowed to drink water frequently, because they are laden [with goods].”60 Field experiments on humans and animals with scabs and cowpox-like fluids in late colonial Guatemala perhaps seem shocking to our contemporary sensibilities. On the surface, it might appear that scientists, doctors, and colonial officials were unaware of, or simply ignored, the potential dangers involved in extracting fluid from pustules that they found on cattle and other animals and then introduced the materials into human bodies. The actions of colonial authorities and its inspectors, however, show that these men were not unaware of potential dangers. The Protomedicato and provincial leaders sent those licensed medical doctors and aficionados considered experts into the countryside to inspect cattle,

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conduct the tests with various pustular materials found on their bodies, remit samples to the Protomedicato, and report on these results. These men knew what to look for on animal bodies and likely would experiment with smallpox inoculation on humans as Molina did. During the winter of 1804, Molina learned from a local Indian’s son that another cattle herd potentially had cowpox (granos de las bacas) and asked permission from Cozar to experiment with the fluid: “I will follow the instructions that I have on how to inoculate written by Doctor Flores, who has given me permission to do so because I have performed the procedure on a boy.”61 Molina based his request on previous smallpox inoculation experience, and that assured authorities that he possessed a copy of the Audiencia-approved instructions. Once it became known that cows in Lacal might potentially have cowpox, Mariano Larrave, the physician in the area representing the Protomedicato, arrived and offered his medical expertise with the experiments as well.62 Medical doctors and lay inspectors would have known about other cattle diseases that were dangerous to human health, such as carbunco (carbuncle), which we now call anthrax. The Gazeta de Guatemala had included an article about the disease amid colonial-state- directed efforts to obtain the vaccine and the ongoing animal-human experiments that accompanied it. In contrast to the relatively benign cowpox, anthrax causes ulcers and sores in cattle that could be transmitted to humans when they came into contact with an infected animal through the air, by touch, and by the consumption of their meat. Humans sick with anthrax produced blisters or bumps on the skin that then turned into an ulcer or sore with a black center in the same spot.63 Anthrax was a significant health issue in Europe; it was known as “wool-sorters disease” in England because it affected those who harvested and processed wool from anthrax-infected sheep.64 In 1770, an anthrax outbreak in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), thought to have been transmitted by human consumption of infected raw beef, resulted in some 15,000 deaths.65 The Gazeta de Guatemala’s editors circulated descriptions and treatments for anthrax at the same time that medical doctors, inspectors, and lay aficionados conducted field experiments searching for the vacuna. One such human anthrax treatment consisted of “placing an opium poultice on the carbunculous pustule the moment it appears. This method prevents gangrene that comes after the pustule discharge stage, and causes the sore to form a scab. The afflicted’s life can be saved by applying this remedy before the second or third day [of the pustule’s appearance].”66 Another important issue is how to analyze the ethics of human and animal experiments in historical terms because servants, slaves, children, and

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animals served as test subjects in colonial Guatemala and elsewhere in Enlightenment-era Europe and the Americas. During the 1780 smallpox outbreak, when José Flores developed his own inoculation method using a local beetle, he first tested it on one of the president of the Audiencia’s female servants.67 After the development of the Jenner vaccine in 1796, as soon as Protomedicato doctors received a vacuna sample through one of their exchange networks, they immediately vaccinated children with the material to see if it would work.68 Amid the Cattle Project experiments, Molina wrote of inoculating humans with pox materials that he found on cattle to see whether it would produce the telltale cowpox pustule.69 When the Royal Smallpox Vaccination Expedition left Spain for the Americas in 1803, it carried aboard ship cows infected with cowpox to better ensure the arrival of a live vaccine after the transatlantic voyage. It also carried young orphaned boys who were used for successive, arm-to-arm vaccination during the course of the trip.70 Animals served as test subjects in other scientific and medical activities as well. The postmortem cesarean Instructions (1796) penned by medical professors at Guatemala’s University of San Carlos urged that the cesarean be practiced first on pregnant dogs and monkeys to extract live animal fetuses in preparation for conducting the procedure on human women.71 These examples are an important part of the colonial legacy of human and animal experiments for modern medicine practiced in Guatemala and elsewhere. In colonial Guatemala, researchers working in these areas do not seem to have left written evidence that expressed any sort of ethical anxiety or misgivings regarding these practices, including experimenting on children or deliberately keeping animals sick so material for their bodies can be harvested in the service of human health.72 Instead, the emphasis in published sources and written correspondence emphasized the end result, which trumped all other potential concerns, that the Jenner vaccine is the “most important and marvelous discovery that has ever been made,” a discovery that has the ability to prevent the spread of a disease that “kills more than forty million souls every century.”73 As Flores concluded in his appeal to the Crown in support of the Royal Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, he argued that the vaccine would change human history: “You, your majesty, will spread [the vaccine] from California, to the Appalachian Mountains, to the Patagonia Mountains. You, your majesty, will destroy the hideous smallpox monster.”74 Medical doctors and scientists at the time also experimented on themselves. Examples of this circulated in print in late colonial Central America, presenting such men as heroic figures risking their own lives in the pursuit of medical knowledge. In 1804, the Gazeta published a letter from a

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“Dr. Cairo” that described another doctor named Dr. Valli who, after receiving the vaccination, began a series of experiments on himself designed to test its limits.75 Valli, an Italian working in Turkey, “enclos[ed] himself for many days in a lazareto (isolation hospital) where he came in contact with those infected with large tumors and carbuncles (carbuncos) in many different ways, without feeling any [ill] effect.”76 Valli also tested his immunity when he “inoculated himself on his left hand with a mixture of virulent and pestilential virus,” perhaps in imitation of Jenner who tested the cowpox vaccine’s efficacy on a boy by subsequently inoculating him with human smallpox.77 This story appeared amid a series of articles reporting the latest vaccination news and activities in Spain and Europe as Audiencia authorities anticipated the arrival of the Royal Smallpox Vaccination Expedition. Guatemalan doctors also practiced self-experimentation with the vacuna in the wake of its arrival, eager to test the possibilities of the “marvelous fluid.” While Ignacio Ruiz de Cevallo vaccinated towns in Totonicapán province, he could not resist experimenting on himself and others. The surgeon had survived a bout of smallpox at age six. When he vaccinated himself with vacuna, it failed. When he vaccinated himself again, “a true pustule appeared, without a doubt,” showing that even those who had survived epidemic smallpox could be vaccinated with cowpox and produce material for use in further vaccinations.78 Using his findings in the field, the Gazeta de Guatemala reported that he had revised the vaccination directions, arguing that one only needed to introduce the lancet into the skin no further than the depth of a real coin: “Even this assured a successful vaccination.”79 When the Audiencia’s Vaccine Junta published “Regulations for the Propagation and Stability of the Vaccine in the Kingdom of Guatemala” in 1805 after the formal introduction of vaccination, the promotion of human and animal medical experiments became an official part of the Audiencia public health system.80 The junta recommended that “all experiments suggested by this analogy, and by practice, must be conducted with the fluid from these pustules in order to grow it in this territory, if it is possible.”81 Regulation 93, in fact, mandated experiments with pox diseases in humans and animals to maintain a constant supply of the vaccine. Licensed medical doctors had permission to conduct vacuna experiments on humans, while “intellectuals” and “aficionados” had to restrict their experimental work to animals: “Individual inteligentes (intellectuals) and aficionados can only conduct experiments with animals. Should they achieve useful results, they can release their findings to the public with approval from the Central [Vaccine] Junta.”82

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Before and after smallpox vaccination was introduced to Guatemala in late spring of 1804, colonial officials not only allowed for, but also encouraged, the participation of what they called intellectuals and aficionados in experimental activities with humans and animals. The distinction that Guatemala’s Vaccine Laws made was that licensed medical physicians whom the Audiencia formally recognized as experts could conduct experiments on both humans and animals. Interested, practically trained lay persons, however, were formally relegated to experimenting only on animals. The Central Vaccine Junta would then vet their results, and if deemed impor tant enough, would release the information to the public. Additionally, officials in each province were required to organize regular inspections of the Audiencia’s cattle herds for cowpox. Apparently, cattle in Central America seasonally exhibited “a pustule sickness that might be cowpox.”83 Note that in this source the word “cowpox” remained untranslated, suggesting that the word circulated in English in Central America at this time. The Junta especially encouraged experiments to vaccinate all the Audiencia’s sheep with cowpox because certain “public papers” had shown that cowpox could be stored in the living bodies of sheep, who “conserved the preservative nature of las viruelas without alteration.”84 The sheep had to be periodically revaccinated with smallpox, however, to “conserve the fluid in flocks of sheep, in case it was extinguished among [human] populations.85 There did not seem to be concern here either with cross-species transfer from the infected sheep to humans. Within Guatemala’s experimental cultures, the capital was the most impor tant hub for formal antiepidemic activities, including the medical juntas populated by medical, Audiencia, and religious authorities. Other activities, however, such as the animal experiments, necessarily took place primarily in rural areas where inteligentes and aficionados, along with itinerant vaccinators, regularly tested new ideas on animals. Because these persons were not professionally trained experts, they were not supposed to deviate from official Protomedicato guidelines.”86 It is hard to tell, however, whether and to what extent this was enforced in practice.

The Central Vaccination Junta On April 27, 1804, Ignacio Pabón y Muñoz sent a cowpox sample, a medical needle, and new vaccination instructions from Veracruz to Nueva Guatemala where his brothers Cayetano and Manuel Pabón lived.87 When the

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shipment arrived in the capital twenty days later on May 16, Narciso Esparragosa immediately reconstituted the dried cowpox and vaccinated two girls and four boys, all children of elite residents of the capital.88 “The vaccination liquor,” as Esparragosa called it, came preserved on a small bit of thread placed between two pieces of glass.89 He made four pricks with the material on the bodies of each of the children. Alfonso Wading’s body first produced a pustule that demonstrated a successful vaccination. Esparragosa asserted that he could tell that Wading’s was a positive vaccination “based on the information he had received from Paris, Philadelphia, and Madrid, that described in detail what one should look like.”90 He reassured readers “that small, almost imperceptible atom, even though it appears inactive, is the beginning of the propagation of the vacuna among us.91 On May 25, Esparragosa, with Protomédico Córdova in attendance, pricked Wading, and “immediately, as soon as he made the opening on the lower part of the pustule, a clear and transparent liquor seeped out little by little.”92 Esparragosa recorded the historic moment in his journal, later excerpted into the Gazeta de Guatemala, where he paid homage to the vacuna pustule’s wondrous contents: Using a pair of delicate scissors I cut the membrane that covered the pustule in a semi- circle, lifted that portion away from the skin, and revealed its center. Later, I decisively confirmed the experiment using a magnifying glass that showed to the [medical] professors, without a doubt, evidence of a genuine vaccine pustule that existed, in all its perfection, to propagate with its fluid the priceless treasure that it enclosed.93

A few days later, another of the original six children, a girl named Magdalena Sosa, also produced a viable, robust pustule from the Veracruz fluid.94 The bodies of these two children, a kind of medical Adam and Eve, thus began the vaccination chain in colonial Central America. On June 2, Protomédico Córdova used vacuna from Wading to vaccinate three of his own children. He also vaccinated high-status religious men in the capital who had somehow managed to avoid natural smallpox into adulthood, along with similar prelates, priests, and rectors who worked in the city’s religious colleges and academies. Another priority from the perspective of the Protomedicato was nuns and priests living in Nueva Guatemala’s convents and monasteries and lay religious women living in beaterios. Córdova brought his youngest vaccinated daughter, an unnamed seven-year- old, to the convents and beaterios housing cloistered religious women, where he used the

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vacuna from her pustule to vaccinate, in this case spreading the fluid from female to female.95 The Protomedicato also called together licensed medical doctors, lay surgeons, practicantes, pasantes de medicina, and others that formed the area’s formal and informal medical workforce, asking them to “bring children” (llevasen niños). The children were then used as medical subjects to publicly demonstrate the procedure to others and propagate the vaccine at the same time. After that, these newly trained vaccinators fanned out and worked on their own through the city’s neighborhoods and surrounding indigenous towns, using arm-to-arm transmission and keeping detailed lists of those vaccinated. By June  23, the Gazeta reported some 3,000 to 4,000 persons vaccinated in the capital, including more than 800 by Esparragosa and another 774 by Córdova; the rest were vaccinated by medical professors, their students, and lay health care workers.96 Initially, the vaccine’s spread to other Audiencia provinces developed informally, carried out by interested and motivated individuals to what is now El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Gregorio Castriciones, who was visiting Nueva Guatemala at the time of the first vaccinations there that late spring of 1804, returned to his home in San Salvador with a stored vacuna sample and two recently vaccinated boys with robust pustules (vacunados) for arm-to-arm vaccinations.97 Narciso Esparragosa sent many vacuna samples at his own expense to a medical doctor in León, Nicaragua, named Quiñones, who used the material to vaccinate that city’s inhabitants. Quiñones then sent the vacuna further on to Costa Rica.98 Esparragosa also mailed vacuna samples to Trujillo, Granada, and Quetzaltenango.99 Meanwhile, in July 1804, Francisco Pastor, an emissary of the Royal Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, split from the main group in Campeche in the Yucatán peninsula and boarded a ship for Laguna de Terminos. This was the first stage of the journey that would eventually take Pastor to the Audiencia of Guatemala’s capital city.100 Pastor brought with him two recently vaccinated boys who would be used for arm-to-arm propagation en route.101 Pastor and the boys disembarked at Laguna de Terminos and traveled to the capital city of Tabasco, Villa Hermosa. After a brief two-day stay, they continued to Ciudad Real, Chiapas, and from there to Nueva Guatemala. On November 8, 1804, the group arrived in the capital.102 By that time, the Protomedicato had already been conducting systematic vaccinations in the Audiencia for close to six months.103 In early 1805, the Audiencia established the Central Vaccination Committee (Junta Central de la Vacuna), the formal colonial bureaucracy that

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planned and regulated smallpox vaccination policy and campaigns in the Audiencia.104 The committee’s first meeting took place on March 3, 1805, in Nueva Guatemala. It included four permanent members, the archbishop, Audiencia regent, the protomédico, and a secretary, and three elected members, one each from the ecclesiastical council, the city council of the capital, and a professor of medicine or surgeon from the University of San Carlos. These men served two-year terms.105 The enactment of the junta formalized what had already been occurring informally to organize the spread of the vaccine and ensure its propagation. The committee worked to develop systematic vaccination networks not only in the capital and important regional towns or areas with large tributary Indian populations, but across Central America. The main regional distribution points were San Salvador and Comayagua, and from there to Trujillo, León, Chiquimula, Costa Rica, Sosonate, and Verapaz.106 Authorities from the port city of Omoa travelled to Chiquimula to pick up the vaccine and then had the responsibility of spreading it further to towns along the Atlantic coast. In Costa Rica, systematic vaccination began when the provincial junta there named Manuel de Sol Costa Rica’s vaccinator, and Santiago Celos, professor of medicine in San Salvador, as the designated vaccinator in that province.107 Both appointed vaccinators provided regular reports from the field.108 Provincial alcaldes mayores and intendants submitted regular “State of the Vaccination” reports back to the committee in the capital that assessed any smallpox outbreaks and the vaccination campaign’s progress in their areas.109 By March 1805, when Protomédico Córdoba had become permanently incapacitated by illness, Esparragosa took over as acting protomédico and chaired the vaccination committee.110 Emotions ran high in the capital in the wake of the vaccine’s arrival: “So great were the feelings of joy, in contrast to those of terror that before had occurred with each appearance of the symptoms of pestilential smallpox.”111 To celebrate, political and religious authorities organized a special public religious celebration in Nueva Guatemala’s cathedral. In Enlightenment Guatemala, the acquisition of the vaccine could simultaneously be a modern, medical process and a religious experience. The president and other members of the Royal Audiencia, university faculty, city government officials, members of religious orders, Guatemala’s archbishop, and leading citizens all attended the event, “and as many others who could fit into the Cathedral.”112 Mariano García, Remedios parish priest, said mass and gave a sermon, celebrating “the ineffable blessing that Divine Providence has given to this kingdom [of Guatemala], the speedy and assured acquisition of the vaccine, the most trusted and admirable prevention against smallpox.”113

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The Gazeta reported that García’s sermon “was filled with deep emotion and piety, with a noble simplicity appropriate for the pulpit, that had a vivid effect among the many who listened, shown by [their] tears of joy.”114 The acquisition of the vaccine induced a range of responses among individuals: some actively sought it out while others rejected it. Still others saw it as a religious experience. The parish priest of Ostuncalco, José Santiago Estrada, reported to the vaccination committee that a girl named Josefa González “who said that she had been born blind, acquired her sight after being vaccinated,” the vaccination here providing the basis for a kind of a miraculous healing event.115 Some had unexpected physical outcomes from the vaccination, as did another of Estrada’s parishioners, a girl named Margarita Galindo. After vaccination, she became “covered in vaccine pustules” when only one should have appeared.116 The Vaccine Laws required that the protomédico investigate both positive and negative anomalies that appeared to stem from vaccinations.117 Claims that vaccinations gave humans additional immunities, or cured other illnesses, were met with excitement and generated further experiments. Cases where the vaccine seemed to have detrimental effects or spread illnesses were also quickly investigated so as to quash the spread of rumors that might cause people to mistrust and reject the vaccine. The committee ordered Quetzaltenango’s junta to contact the priest Estrada for further information about both women’s vaccination experiences. The committee seemed most interested in the case of Galindo, who asked for a specialist to examine her body to see “if her pustules showed the characteristics of a true vaccination, and whether fluid from them could be used to propagate the vaccine in other individuals.”118 About a month after the request, Estrada notified the committee that Ostuncalco’s vaccinators, Luis Mata and Mariano Rivera, judged that Galindo’s vacuna pustules did indeed contain “the true fluid.” Galindo had left the pueblo, however, before they could formally test that fluid. At some point later she returned, and the men revaccinated her, but that time Galindo’s vaccination produced no pustules. As for González, she had indeed been born with “clouds” in each of her eyes that completely prevented her from seeing. About fifteen days after her vaccination “she acquired sight, though just a little bit.”119 This attention to detail underscores the importance of constant vigilance and adaptation of the vaccination procedure to ensure its success. There were worries that vaccinating with material from those sick with certain contagious illnesses would contribute to the spread of those diseases. This issue came up most forcefully in Costa Rica as vaccinator Manuel del Sol prepared to vaccinate lepers who lived in the barrio of Chilgagre. Many

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worried that the use of their pus to vaccinate others would promote the spread of leprosy through the community. In the end, Costa Rica’s junta decided to go ahead with the vaccinations. However, vaccinators did not propagate further the fluid from their pustules, publicizing this decision to ensure that the public did not become fearful of the vaccine.120 Audiencia officials additionally vaccinated a wide range of animals, from sheep and horses to dogs, to see if it also protected them from additional diseases regardless of whether there was any evidence that this might be the case.121 Rabid dogs were a significant problem in the capital at this time. Because of this, Guatemala’s Vaccine Laws went so far as to recommend that dogs should be vaccinated with cowpox in case it might provide them immunity from rabies: “We do not have any evidence yet that vaccinating dogs [with cowpox] will protect them from rabies. During the dry season in this capital [Nueva Guatemala], we see so many rabid animals that this [possibility] might as well be tested, to see if we can decrease their numbers.”122 Additionally, many domestic animals in Guatemala—horses, mules, and “other animals”—annually suffered from “the terrible animal disease called plague or epidemic that destroys a great number of them each year.”123 The junta also encouraged owners to vaccinate these animals with cowpox in the hopes that this would provide protection for their herds. Once the Central Vaccination Committee formalized and centralized the spread of the Jenner vaccine, colonial power had the potential to reach into colonized bodies even in the remotest areas of Central America. Stateappointed vaccinators, assisted by other support personnel, enacted new censuses and kept careful records of infants and young children and their vaccination status. New institutions enforced this power at the local level with the aid of epidemic hospitals that emerged in major cities and small towns outside of the capital, and the less formal and temporary lazarettos in small and remote communities, where health care workers administered colonial medicines and quarantined the afflicted. The abundance of archived material produced by antiepidemic campaigns and the institutions and personnel working in the ser vice of colonial medicine after the transition to smallpox vaccination together document the medical surveillance of colonial subjects in across Central America and portrays the Audiencia of Guatemala as a thoroughly modern colonial state. Some of the more striking examples of state power are the vaccination censuses for infants and young children that began to be regularly conducted in the wake of the 1790s outbreak and that were legally mandated by the Guatemalan Vaccine Laws of 1805. This meant that not only the church kept records of births, but the state did as well for medical purposes,

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carefully identifying not only living newborns and infants, but also dead infants (párvulos muertos) and vaccination exceptions.124 This kind of information collection drew on the labor of the church and the parish priests and prelates who could attest to their accuracy, especially in rural areas and indigenous communities.125 The priest of Jocotenango, himself a member of the Vaccine Junta, sent one such census to the archbishop, noting each of his parishioners who had not yet been vaccinated and the reasons for this. This same priest also assisted the medical doctor with vaccinations and inspections in Jocotenango parish towns.126 Priests additionally played an ideological role in helping to promote the vaccine and compile vaccination censuses, their role formally written into Guatemala’s Vaccine Laws. In rural areas in par ticular, parish priests as trusted local representatives formed part of the vaccination rituals, as they had during the smallpox inoculations:127 “[In pueblos] without a hospital, a vaccinator will conduct vaccinations in parish buildings with the priest and the comisionado of the provincial junta present. Music will be played during these procedures, according to the custom of religious rituals of those towns. All musicians in the parish will be notified that they must present themselves, without pay.”128 As might be expected, officials emphasized vaccination successes, submitting censuses to the vaccine committee that documented tens of thousands vaccinated over the year following the arrival of the vacuna to the Audiencia of Guatemala.129 Based on these reports, El Salvador’s head vaccinator traveled some 867 miles, vaccinating 10,459 persons in 380 days.130 Vaccinator Don Ignacio Ruiz vaccinated all seven pueblos in Jacaltenango parish, some 858  persons. “Now everyone susceptible to the smallpox contagion along the Camino Real has been vaccinated,” he asserted.131 In addition to the Junta Central de la Vacuna located in the capital, provincial vaccine juntas were established in each of the parochial cities of the Audiencia: León, Comayagua, and Ciudad Real.132 Other areas had mixed success. The Central Vaccine Committee named Santos Truxillo Caseros vaccinator of the district of Sacatepéquez. He was responsible for ensuring that the people who lived in the towns around the capital were all vaccinated, and for this work he received a salary of three pesos per day.133 He personally instructed each of the vaccinators before sending them to work.134 However, so many remained unvaccinated, Caseros warned, that there existed a very real threat that they would catch “epidemic smallpox.”135 This description provides a glimpse into the complicated work that committee vaccinators were responsible for. The census that Caseros filed with the vaccine committee that October, which shows 9,914

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vaccinations performed in the Sacatepéquez district, bears this out. Documents such as these certifying the counts, signed by the parish priests of that area and others, accompanied censuses. Caseros cast doubt on its accuracy, however, when he noted that the vaccination count might be too high because “I was not able to observe the vaccinations [personally], nor visit the vaccinated to check on their progress, because of the amount of time that I would need to stay in each pueblo to cultivate the fluid and transfer it.”136 This indicates that the formal documents attesting to the reach of the colonial medical bureaucracy show that the Central Vaccine Committee should not have taken the censuses at face value, nor should scholars researching the history of vaccination campaigns. In fact, the archive is filled with vaccine disruptions after 1804, highlighting the difficulties faced by antiepidemic campaigns. How to propagate the vaccine and keep a supply readily available during outbreaks represented one such challenge. An even more difficult issue that the vaccine committee faced was how to maintain a domestic cowpox supply in nonepidemic times. Medical officials continued to store reservoirs of the vaccine in the bodies of living animals, especially cattle, but with mixed success. Vaccine experiments conducted by Guatemala’s physicians and aficionados had shown that the Audiencia’s sheep, rather than cattle, proved the best animals to house a stable vaccine supply “without alteration.”137 This led the Vaccine Laws to decree that “every ewe and ram in this kingdom [of Guatemala] must be vaccinated, and the vaccination must be repeated periodically, with the goal of maintaining the fluid in these flocks in case it disappears from [human] populations.”138 Specialists still considered arm-to-arm vaccination among humans the safest method to preserve and propagate the vacuna, primarily using children as reservoirs.139 The sources do not generally provide the names of the children, or information on how exactly vaccinators obtained the children, who sometimes came from orphanages and other times directly from their families. They are identified simply as niños (children), and they almost always used two to have a backup in case a vaccination failed or a pustule broke before the vacuna could be harvested from the child’s body. To prevent this, the committee further recommended that to ensure the perpetuation of the fluid, officials should remove recently vaccinated children from their homes and place them in a hospital or lazaretto, or under the watchful eye of a caretaker, to protect their pustules.140 These challenges circulating the vaccine underscore the difficulties faced for years after the vaccine’s introduction. In June 1804, Domingo Fajardo, priest of the Presidio Petén Itza, received word from “a very

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trustworthy man” that the city of Mérida in Yucatán had received a live sample of smallpox vaccine from Veracruz. Fajardo explained his excitement that the vacuna was so close in a letter published in the Gazeta de Guatemala: “In deference, first to humanity, and second, to my duty to those in Guatemala who needed it, I immediately wrote back to the man who notified me (who occupies a position of authority) and he offered to provide me with a vaccinated boy (un muchacho vacunado), and send him to this Presidio at my expense, with the goal of propagating the vaccine by going from place to place.”141 But this plan failed. Instead, Narciso Esparragosa sent the vacuna under the care of Doctor Vicente Carranza, who traveled from the capital to the province of Verapaz, and from there to its final destination at the Presidio Petén Itza.142 In October 1805, Manuel José Escobar, parish priest of Matapam, located in what is now El Salvador, contacted the Central Vaccine Committee members to assure them that he wanted to do all he could so that every member of his parish received vaccination “for the public good.” Because there was no vacuna at that moment in the capital, San Salvador, the committee asked Padre Cura Escobar to send two children to Nueva Guatemala to receive vaccination. Both would then return to Matapam vaccinated with robust pustules, and with the necessary vaccination instructions.143 The formal circulation of children from rural pueblos and frontier areas such as Matapam to sites with vacuna stores became institutionalized through Guatemala’s Vaccine Laws. Religious personnel played key roles in this process, most likely because they had personal relationships with the children and their families, and were often trusted members of communities: “to accomplish vaccinations in the pueblos immediately surrounding the capital, we agreed to commission priests to identify in their respective parishes the residents most willing to verify inoculations, sending children to this city [Nueva Guatemala] so that they can carry the fluid [in their bodies] with the goal of propagating it.”144 The fortified port city of Omoa, located on the Atlantic Ocean on the north coast of sparsely settled colonial Honduras, faced special challenges with regards to epidemic disease. The town had a hospital that regularly housed between thirty and thirty-five patients, including those afflicted by epidemic diseases. Omoa not only faced threats from regular epidemic outbreaks, but also had to carefully inspect incoming ships and crew members for evidence of contagious illness, as when inspectors identified two prisoners who arrived there with smallpox, joining four others there who were already quarantined with the disease.145 Therefore, it was critical to maintain a stable vacuna supply in this port city at all times. In June

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1815, an Omoan official named Antonio de Acuña notified Narciso Esparragosa that the recent “vacuna powder” that he had sent from the capital arrived corrupted. Acuña wrote that “[the vacuna] is such a delicate material, and the risk is very great that towns exposed [to smallpox] will not have any of this precious preservative, especially in this frontier region that is more exposed to epidemic smallpox than any other pueblo.”146 Acuña asked Esparragosa to send another sample by the arm-to-arm method so that vaccinations could take place later that summer.147 Another problem that the Central Vaccine Committee had to solve was the question of just who could legally vaccinate. The Gazeta de Guatemala informed its readers that “the [vaccination] procedure is very simple. Any curious wife can perform it. But because of its great importance, it merits more scrupulous guardianship.”148 Officials preferred that “Spaniards” (españoles) be taught the practice, but others were allowed to vaccinate as well, including nonprofessionals: “One of the principal responsibilities of the [medical] professors commissioned in the provinces is that they teach how to vaccinate in the parish seat of each curacy, preferring Spanish subjects possessed of good standing, basic education, and public spirit. In completely Indian towns, he should teach [vaccination] to school teachers.”149 Yet practical problems such as lack of money and shortages of trained, trustworthy vaccinators could get in the way. José Antonio Lacayo, the vaccinator of León Province, had the responsibility for propagating the vaccine fluid there.150 Authorities had planned to establish a house in the city of León where vaccinated children must stay until doctors could extract vaccine fluid from their pustules. Lacayo, however, could not implement the plan. The city did not have a hospital to house the vaccinated children, and Lacayo did not have the funds needed to rent a house for this purpose, or to pay for the children’s food.151 A lack of qualified vaccinators caused a further delay. Lacayo himself had trained a large number of vaccinators with the idea that they would help spread through the province to cover all the towns. None of the vaccinators, however, were able to propagate the vacuna, leaving Lacayo with the only vacuna supply in the province.152 Provincial vaccine junta officials explained that this was because the province did not have a pool of able men and because vaccinators were not paid for their labor, “so they abandon it.”153 This was complicated by the fact that in 1815, experienced, credentialed medical doctors such as Lacayo and Manuel del Sol were deemed by Léon’s authorities to be too expensive to employ as vaccinators. Instead, they hired cheaper paraprofessionals for the vaccination campaigns in Nicaragua’s indigenous towns.154

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In the end, colonial authorities called on everyone to help with vaccination, even those living in the smallest, most remote towns and settlements in the Audiencia: “There are many who know how [to vaccinate], even in the smallest places, and the parishes, judges, and even first citizens (primeros vecinos) and sickest must contribute, unless they want to be declared cruel enemies of their fellow men, of their patria, and of their own children.”155 Priests continued to perform vaccinations.156 Pinula parish priest Don Vicente Figueroa, after receiving instruction in the fall of 1805, was then “at liberty to conduct vaccinations by the most appropriate methods.” Priest vaccinators in the pueblos surrounding the capital city at that time included Don Juan de Acosta, parish priest of Mixco; Petapa’s priest Don Nicolás Salazar; and Don Francisco Maceda and his brother Don Mariano, who ministered in Amatitán.157 Other paraprofessionals included a pharmacist and his assistants who conducted vaccinations at the Royal Hospital in Trujillo.158 In some areas, medical personnel trained indigenous men to vaccinate even when there was an official vaccinator or medical doctor on hand.159 This was the case in Verapaz, where Doctor Vicente Carranza needed to begin vaccinations in that province, but he could not do so until he obtained an interpreter who spoke one of the local Mayan languages to help with the campaign. The Central Vaccine Committee approved Carranza’s request to name Manuel Tot, a bilingual Indian from the province, as the interpreter to help gain trust of the Maya and ease vaccinations there.160 From the field, Carranza reported that Tot not only translated for campaign workers, he also ably vaccinated the Indians. Carranza requested that Tot be paid a vaccinator’s salary because, he asserted, vaccinations in the town of Cobán would not have succeeded without his help. Vaccination continued to remain controversial in some communities, including those located close to the capital city. In 1805, many K’iche’ and Kaqchikel Maya who lived in the town of Jocotenango, located on the outskirts of the former capital Santiago de Guatemala, refused to allow Narciso Esparragosa, the head of the Central Vaccine Committee, to vaccinate their children.161 Esparragosa wrote that “the vaccinations in the pueblo of Jocotenango are proceeding very slowly due to the resistance of its Indian residents.”162 By mid August he had only been able to vaccinate forty children because of “the same difficulties as before.”163 It was not until October 9 that Esparragosa finally finished, remitting a census showing 296 vaccinations. He reflected that “the Indians have so little appreciation for this blessing [vaccination] that it is almost necessary to force them to receive it.”164

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The Gazeta reported frequently on the progress of the vaccination campaigns in Indian communities to keep the reading public up to date. One type of story described how initial opposition was overcome either by a diligent doctor or priest, as in the case of Panajachel, a primarily Kaqchikel Maya town located on the shores of Lake Atitlán.165 Franciscan priest Santiago Pérez wanted to bring the vaccine to his parishioners as soon as he heard that it was available. He travelled to Antigua Guatemala with two Indian children in tow. There he had the two boys vaccinated and he learned the procedure. Upon returning to Panajachel, the priest “vaccinated with great success, vanquishing with his persuasion the repugnance [that his Indian] parishioners felt.”166 Pérez went on to vaccinate the residents in all five towns of his parish: 268 persons in Panajachel, 136 in San Antonio Palapó, 208 in San Andrés, 155 in Concepción, and 177 in Santa Catalina, “leaving only a few unvaccinated, because they were sick, or because they were infants still breastfeeding.”167 Vaccine resistance was harder to overcome in the towns in Totonicapán Province, where both Indians and ladinos refused vaccination. In August 1804, Ignacio Ruiz de Cevallo, a professor of surgery, vaccinated some 871 individuals in the provincial capital. After that, however, “he continued more slowly, because Indians, and even some ladinos, [are] stupid and ignorant, and he encountered much resistance, saying that they did not want to receive smallpox unless it was from the hand of God; mistaking the sickness for the cure.”168 Quetzaltenango’s provincial vaccine junta complained in 1806 that K’iche’ residents of the towns of Cantel, Almolonga, and Zunil “resisted receiving vaccinations.”169 The Central Vaccine Committee warned the officials in charge to first “exhaust all gentle measures” of persuasion. They also asked them to enlist the help of the priest Felix González, who the year before had successfully “promoted and practiced vaccinations in his parish.”170 These resistances show that even though communities might have participated in inoculation or vaccination campaigns in the past, that did not mean they automatically would agree to vaccinations in the future. This kept colonial medical campaigns off balance. Indians in the town of San Sebastián resisted vaccinations during the summer of 1806, even though residents had received inoculations during an earlier outbreak. Medical personnel reported that, in the end, they vaccinated 560  persons, “even though it took a lot of work, and now the vaccinator could not conduct any more, because the Indians did not want to be vaccinated.”171 Priest Don Pedro Alvarado helped provide some extra assistance, “explaining to his parishioners the benefit that results, and that no disease

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would afflict them, as they had seen for themselves in those who had been inoculated.”172 Through the 1810s, maintaining stable stores of the vacuna also continued to pose a challenge. Vaccine propagation became a critical issue when epidemic smallpox broke out in 1814 in Santa Lucia and San Pablo in Chiapas Province. Protomédico Esparragosa, visiting Chiapas at that time, was not prepared for the outbreak. There was no trained vaccinator available, nor was there vacuna. He wrote to Doctor Mariano Larrave in the capital to send vacuna as soon as possible: “You must sent vaccinated boys; do not trust the glass which, as you know, leads to inert fluid.”173 As the Chiapas outbreak continued, Esparragosa advised officials there to continue to propagate the vacuna in cows so that there would be a backup supply in case the arm-to-arm method failed.174 He concluded by reminding Larrave that “epidemic smallpox is the devouring enemy of the human species.”175 By the mid 1810s, officials appear to have settled on cows rather than sheep as the preferred animal to propagate the vacuna, though the process remained a delicate one. One of Esparragosa’s students, Mariano José Suárez, wrote that in Ciudad Real and other towns in Chiapas, vaccinators worked with fluid extracted from cows with cowpox. The resulting vaccination pustules from the area’s cattle herds, however, had been smaller than usual, leading to reduced amounts of vacuna per pustule. Nevertheless, Suárez assured Esparragosa of their efficacy: “When we vaccinated with the cowpox, large and beautiful areolae appeared, with all the usual features.”176 Maintaining stable supplies was still not a given however. A few years later, in 1818, Suárez, then working in Tuxtla, thanked Esparragosa for sending another fluid sample that he had successfully “inserted into cows” to restart the propagation chain there and continue with the vaccinations.177 Doctors continued to complain of the difficulties they faced locating the people they needed to vaccinate through the early 1800s, even in areas located near the capital, such as the smaller hamlets in the Fraijanes area. Alcalde Mayor Andrés Saavedra y Alfaro reported that many Indians in that region lived dispersed outside of towns and avoided the reach of the colonial state, in this case to avoid the rite of baptism, preferring instead to practice indigenous birth rituals using animal familiars.178 Ten years later, in 1815, the situation in Fraijanes had not changed. Vaccinator José Equizaval found similar challenges posed by the remoteness of the hamlets, making it hard to locate all the people who needed vaccination; residents also insisted on living “not in their houses, but in their agricultural fields.”179 Nor did the area have any vacuna stores. Equizaval wrote to Esparragosa

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to send two vaccinated boys to reestablish a supply. The lack of vacuna coupled with Indian dispersal plagued other regions as well. Also in 1815, vaccinator Pablo José Guzmán found six people sick with smallpox living in their milpas near Guacalate. He heard rumors that many other unvaccinated residents also lived in their agricultural fields. He requested more vacuna to attend to these people when he found them.180 In addition to the problems of dispersal allowing Guatemala’s rural and indigenous peoples to intentionally and unintentionally avoid vaccination, others rejected vaccinations outright, showing significant mistrust toward health care workers. Santos Cazeros, writing from Santa María during the fall of 1815, notified the Protomedicato of six epidemic smallpox victims housed in the town’s small lazaretto, three with active smallpox and three survivors whose pustules were drying out. Despite this danger, “the Indians are reluctant to be vaccinated.”181 The Audiencia’s public health programs also faced the problem of lay healers who continued to use the dangerous inoculation procedure even after vaccine use was well established, as when, in 1815, the parish priest of Chinautla complained that the curandero Manuel de Jesús Luzero was inoculating there with epidemic smallpox rather than with the vacuna, and so threatened to begin another outbreak.182

“The Indians Did Not Want Me to Cure Them” Indigenous opposition stemmed not only from mistrust of inoculation or vaccination, but also from the associated policing mechanisms that structured the medical campaigns, as in the conflicts that arose in the K’iche’ Maya town of Santa María de Chiquimula in 1802 as colonial medical campaigns sought to impose antismallpox measures there.183 Chiquimula’s first alcalde, Juan Uz, and elders Miguel Soq’, Pedro Tiu, Miguel Lux, and Antonio Castro all objected to the intrusive house-to-house inspection that forcibly removed smallpox victims and quarantined them. They also refused to allow the mandated child census to take place that would record all of the town’s infants and children by name with their inoculation status.184 Comisionado José Antonio Godinez was the sole official member of the antismallpox campaign present in Chiquimula at that time, an important detail that he noted as well, commenting that “in this pueblo there is not one ladino or militia solider.”185 Gertrudis Godinez, likely his wife, was also present. She assisted her husband in some aspects of his work, including signing as an official witness on reports about the conflict that he submitted

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to colonial authorities.186 Godinez is also exceptional because she was literate and signed her own name to these official documents.187 Two of Chiquimula’s bilingual K’iche’ office holders worked closely with Godinez, acting as translators in negotiations with opposition leaders. Both men also signed their names as witnesses to Godinez’s official reports and to the correspondence with provincial and Audiencia officials. One of these men was Gaspar Pu, the parish’s choirmaster, the other Miguel Tzoi, who occupied the important position of town scribe.188 Events in Chiquimula show the ways sickness in everyday life could also influence or limit the administration of public health programs in the field during epidemic outbreaks.189 Francisco Aguirre, Totonicapán’s alcalde mayor at that time, would have gone himself to Chiquimula to address the resistance there, except that he found himself confined to bed since April 26 with “rheumatic pains” and erysipelas.190 Aguirre contacted Don Gerónimo Tarazena, the comisionado working in Sacaja, and asked him to go in his place to help Godinez.191 Tarazena wrote back that he could not help because not only had he identified worrisome outbreaks of both smallpox and typhus among that town’s residents, but that he, too, had fallen ill, with a pain in my chest that went away that evening, and I think that it was dolor ventoso. But today when I sent the package with the [smallpox] censuses to you, I travelled through the countryside on horseback. When I returned, my sickness came back, and it bothered me so much that I resolved not to travel. . . . I ask you the favor of excusing me from going [to Chiquimula] right now because I find myself so full of flatulence that I have taken to bed.192

The only other comissionado in that parish, Don Agustín Arriola, was also quite ill and unable to travel, leaving “not one person who can resolve this grave issue.”193 In the end, Francisco Chamorro, Quetzaltenango’s corregidor, agreed to go to the area. Godinez remained in Chiquimula and continued to press local leaders through his interpreters, but they firmly refused to cooperate with antismallpox measures.194 Chamorro decided to work out of nearby Momostenango rather than travel to Chiquimula, reasoning, “I preferred to travel to Momostenango, where I showed the good sense to use gentle methods that prudence dictates that the Indian caste merits.”195 He ordered the town’s Indian alcaldes to meet with him there and explain themselves, but they refused the summons.196 By May 20, an increasingly frustrated Chamorro notified Chiquimula’s leadership by letter that if they did not

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come to Momostenango to meet with him immediately, no longer would they be treated with gentleness, but instead with “force and rigor.”197 Still in Chiquimula, Godinez sent regular updates. In addition to assessing the smallpox outbreak, Godinez analyzed the town’s Indian leadership. On the one hand, Indian translators and allies Gaspar Pu and Miguel Tzoi were both “Castilian (castellanos) and the most rational in the pueblo,” the “Castilian” here likely referring to their bilingual language abilities and willingness to support the medical campaign and its methods. On the other hand, Miguel Pu and the other Indian elders and political office holders who led the opposition treated him with “black expressions,” using a “rebellious tone and determined insubordination.”198 Encouraged by their alcaldes and principales, some Chiquimula residents and their families climbed up to los montes to avoid antismallpox measures, a landscape described as “twenty square leguas on inaccessible ravines.”199 Godinez believed they took sick family members (virolentos) with them and possibly spread disease further. He did not know for sure, however, because when the Indians brought their dead to town for burial, they did not allow anyone to inspect the corpses: “They [the Indians hiding in los montes] brought down the bodies of their dead wrapped and sewn into white cloth (trapos blancos). If I wanted to inspect them [the dead], this would awaken the riot (tumulto) that alcalde Miguel Pu has always supported.”200 In July, when Alcalde Mayor Aguirre sent militia soldiers to Chiquimula to force the townspeople to acquiesce to the house-to-house inspections and census, residents reacted quickly “because of the fear that the mothers had for their children.”201 Parents gathered a group of fifty-seven children, the oldest no more than eight or nine years old, and sent them to los montes under the cover of night, apparently without an adult.202 At some point the children became lost. Indian justices from San Antonio Ylotenango searched for the group and found them on July 18. The children were returned to Chiquimula, apparently in good condition, but not before colonial officials compiled a list of the children found and the names of the parents who claimed them.203 Parents included many of the town’s leaders who had opposed the smallpox measures: principal Miguel Castro, who recovered his daughter Juana; First Alcalde Juan Uz, who picked up his daughter Ysabel; and principal Miguel Lux, who claimed his daughter Magdalena. Even though public health campaign workers frequently cited the supposed inability of Central America’s native peoples to understand colonial medicine as an explanation for their rejection of it, many understood all .

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too well not only colonial medical treatments but also the forms of colonial power that accompanied them. This incident brings to light how rejection of colonial medicine during epidemics could stem from personal motivations, including protecting children and other family members not just from disease but from colonial authorities, doctors, and militia soldiers that formed the campaigns. This was also the case in Santiago Sacatepéquez, where in 1811, residents rejected the prescribed treatments and mandated quarantine when infectious fevers broke out. They mistrusted the campaign’s doctor Pedro Molina to such a degree that they accused him of killing their children, forcing him to flee the town in fear for his life. According to the priest who escaped with him, the conflict was caused by “a ladino [who] has persuaded [the Indians] that the doctor wants to kill them.”204 Molina had come to town to treat those afflicted by what he called typhus-like “contagious putrid fevers” and to stop its further spread. A local couple hosted him and the parish priest in their home during their visit. One afternoon in early May, two men, a ladino named Juan Jesús de Nava and an indigenous former governor Martín Chinoy, burst into their room during siesta. The men, both described as drunk, questioned Molina about a rumor circulating that the town’s sick residents would be forcibly removed from their homes and quarantined in the local epidemic hospital. Chinoy particularly worried that his son, sick with the putrid fevers, would be one of those quarantined.205 As the discussion became heated, Molina and the priest left their sleeping room and moved into the hallway, where “we became aware that the patio and hallway of the house was filled with Indians, and that some of the Indians had come with Navas and Chinoy to oppose the removal of the sick to the hospital.”206 All the townspeople present agreed that it was “better if everyone died all together” in their homes.207 The thirty-four-year- old Molina represented a new generation of professional doctors who led public health campaigns in the now institutionalized antiepidemic efforts of the colonial state. He held medical and surgical degrees from the University of San Carlos, where he studied under José Flores, José Antonio Córdova, and Narciso Esparragosa, all illustrious Enlightenment-era physicians who had played central roles in the establishment of colonial medical campaigns and public health policy. Each of these men had gone on to head Guatemala’s Protomedicato, as Molina would later in his career. The forced-quarantine rumor that caused the uproar had some truth to it, as Molina did indeed judge the putrid fevers so contagious that the sick could not safely remain in their homes without infecting healthy family members. Yet he acknowledged the difficulty enacting this policy because

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the residents “are so dispersed” and difficult to locate. Families also continued to practice their own medical treatments. We know this because Molina complained that “I also cannot stop the inappropriate medicines and foods [that their families treat them with], and they resist those that I provide. They are distrustful of my intentions.”208 This incident also shows the continued practice of distinct Maya and local medicine, even in towns close to colonial centers of power like Santiago Sacatepéquez. It also appears that Molina and the priest had not anticipated any opposition to their treatments because no militia soldiers had accompanied them. Suspicion of colonial medicine and its treatments reads the same as in earlier outbreaks: no matter the disease, indigenous residents remained divided over the efficacy of colonial medicine and its institutions and the trustworthiness of its representatives. In par ticular, the town’s Kaqchikel residents rejected the epidemic hospital as a more beneficial space of healing than their own homes. Part of that mistrust also likely had to do with the fact that language remained a significant barrier for the campaigns— doctors and other medical personnel could not communicate directly with indigenous townspeople, so they had to rely on translators and bilingual residents, if any were available. This is exactly the situation that Molina found himself in as the confrontation escalated: “I did not understand what they said in their language, but the priest and [ladino] Juan de Jesús Nava explained to me that the Indians did not want me to cure them. They believed that the treatments that I administered were not fitting to their nature, and that I was poisoning them, and that I had come to kill them.”209 The participation of the former governor Chinoy, who acted as spokesperson for the group along with the influential Nava, in Molina’s opinion “gave the Indians courage to resist my treatments and the medicines that I provided, [believing] that they are not useful.”210 This underscores the continued critical importance of gaining the cooperation of local Indian elites to elicit a town’s trust and their cooperation with the recommended treatment methods and quarantines. In the wake of Molina’s escape, Protomedicato and colonial authorities readied to send another medical campaign to the town. Molina had refused to return, but he did make two suggestions that he thought might increase the changes for success for the next doctor. Both center on the continued use of local and Mesoamerican medical treatments in Santiago Sacatepéquez. First, Molina counseled, “make sure, with the greatest of care, that the Indians do not treat [the sick] with bloodletting, cold baths on the head (baños frios en la cabeza) or the drugs (drogas) that they use indiscriminately.”211 Additionally, “do not let the Indians feed the sick the solid

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food that they eat,” Molina warned, because “it causes pernicious results.”212 Careful attention to communication was the best way “to overcome their terror of doctors and medicine; it is necessary to instill in [the Indians] respect for these methods that they [must] take for their benefit, even if they are not capable of understanding them.”213 As a result, two bilingual ladinos were appointed to the second medical campaign to translate for the new doctor. Attention to points of conflict show that native peoples and the rural poor challenged and reshaped medical campaigns and colonial health care when they used Mesoamerican medicine and practitioners and when they forced medical workers to adjust to their flight, dispersal, refusal, violence, and threat of violence in ways that preoccupied colonial leaders and stalled antiepidemic efforts. These conflicts occurred not only when public health campaigns introduced new technologies, such as inoculation and vaccination, but could flare up for years and decades later, long after the medical therapies were no longer new. This reveals a medical landscape that continued to be shaped by multiple medical cultures; a range of colonial, lay, and indigenous medical practitioners; and the healing preferences of the sick themselves. Together, these influences continued to shape modern medicine in Central America as it moved into the postcolonial era.

Conclusion

The reach of medicine through public health efforts extended the symbolics and practice of colonial rule to subject populations in colonial Central America, including to its majority indigenous populations, in new and intimate ways and on a massive scale not seen since the religious conversion campaigns and extreme epidemic-disease mortality rates of the first decades after conquest.1 Audiencia-wide campaigns that inoculated and later vaccinated hundreds of thousands of its residents across southern Mexico, Guatemala, and the rest of Central America transformed their immune system. Efforts that introduced local populations to new healing therapies using medical humanitarianism to confront epidemics prioritized fetal health and reshaped the relationship between individuals, disease, death, and life. Public health campaign policies that managed and controlled epidemics and monitored pregnant women transformed the colonial state’s relationship to its multiethnic populations. Quarantines, lazaretos, and the construction of new Campo Santo burial grounds, along with attempts to identify and suppress Mesoamerican healing-ritual spaces, including temascales and adoratorios, recolonized the physical landscape. Despite the fact that public health policies and antiepidemic campaigns designed by colonial elites were an integral part of the political and economic reforms of the enlightened Bourbon era, this aspect of colonial governance has often been ignored in the historiography. Why, then, does a medical perspective matter? Public health campaigns bring to light through their record-keeping practices changing ideas not only for what it meant to be a colonial subject, but also what it meant to be human in a colonial state, articulated 197

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through a language of inclusion for Indians, the rural poor, women, and fetuses. Doctors and the Protomedicato could and did act as advocates for Indians and others. It was in their self-interest to do so, but they were advocating for them nonetheless. We cannot discount, therefore, the impact that mass death from epidemics had on those who survived them as motivating factors for the humanitarian discourses that framed colonial antiepidemic campaigns. Here Protomédico Flores reflects on the human suffering that he witnessed when smallpox broke out in 1780: [Smallpox] arrived in the person of a young mulato [traveling from Oaxaca with the June mail delivery], who had the presence of mind to ask for help. With these last breaths he died, and in the process he infected all the children of the house. With this unexpected surprise, I found myself in a ruined Guatemala. I flew to the capital to set up the inoculation [program]. And, in spite of the speed with which we set up these practices, . . . the epidemic caused such widespread death. In this storm, the same numbers of Indians, castas, and whites shipwrecked. Such a horrific spectacle left a very strong impression, and [I became] submerged in a profound meditative melancholy.2

The act of witnessing caused mental anguish and also provided the motivation to lessen human suffering using the tools of a modern colonial medicine. Some of the doctors and scientists who actively participated in Enlightenment cultures and helped design and implement public health campaigns in Central America later took on prominent political roles during the independence era and the first decades of postcolonial political rule. Doctor Pedro Molina, who was educated at the University of San Carlos, worked as surgeon in the Batallón de Fijo in Granada, Nicaragua, from 1803 to 1813 and participated in or led public health campaigns in indigenous communities in the Guatemalan highlands. This experience gave him the credentials needed to eventually take over the position of protomédico and then to play an active role in postindependence Central American politics and culture. He founded two independence-era newspapers, El Editor Constitucional and El Genio de la Libertad, and he collaborated with the influential Aycinena family in the Plan Pacífico de Independencia (1821). Molina represented the Federal Republic of Central America at a regional congress in Panama, eventually becoming Ministro de Centro América in Gran Colombia, his active political career in Guatemalan and Central American politics continuing until his death in

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1854.3 Doctor Mariano Larrave spent his early medical career working in the first public health campaigns including acting as a cowpox inspector and experimenting with pustular illnesses on animals and humans. As a member of Guatemala’s intellectual circles in the capital, he helped José Longinos Martínez establish and organize Guatemala’s Natural History Museum. Larrave additionally worked as a surgeon at the Hospital San Juan de Dios and as a professor at the Colegio de Cirujanos. He later entered politics as an alcalde and signatory of the Acta de Independencia.4 Molina and Larrave’s political participation further underscores the ways that prominent medical doctors gained experience and prestige as members of the early medical campaigns that facilitated their transition into elite political circles; it also underscores the importance of health to state governance in the nineteenth century. While Guatemalan elites viewed their support of campaigns against disease and the promotion of postmortem cesareans as evidence of enlightened modernity and humanitarianism, their implementation rested firmly on colonial processes. Epidemic and infectious disease outbreaks demanded an immediate response. State- directed medical campaigns were by necessity improvisational systems that reacted to an emergency and as such reveal the limits of medical humanitarianism as practiced in late colonial Central America. Medical workers expected native peoples to welcome colonial medicine into their lives and belief systems and to be grateful for colonial efforts to protect their health and that of their children. What they repeatedly found was something more complicated. As a result, medical humanitarianism transformed and adapted, increasingly revealing its coercive colonial aspects as the initial inclusive language of “all of humanity,” where all were equally deserving of health delivered by colonial medicine, persistently confronted entrenched Mesoamerican medical cultures and multiple resistances by multiethnic subject populations. These conflicts bring to light the contradictions within the humanitarian aims of medicine when the military (in the colonial sense of the word), and its use of violence and threat of violence, became a significant point of contact between the Audiencia, provinces, and local communities. The use of militia soldiers and hired men to enforce quarantines, conduct house-to house inspections and censuses, destroy infected buildings and homes, arrest and physically punish resistant indigenous political officials and local elites, and erase temascales and adoratorios from the landscape, aimed to terrorize local populations with displays of colonial power. Forced medical procedures increased mistrust between antiepidemic workers and those they treated, especially therapies that had to do with blood extraction or exchange as

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occurred with inoculation, vaccination, and medicinal bloodletting. These historical processes can help explain how by the early decades of the nineteenth century public health transformed from a humanitarian service into a patriotic act performed in support of the late colonial state. We see this in Central America in 1815 when, after the successful launch of a vaccination program in Cartago, colonial officials described it as “el gran Patriotismo” (the greatest patriotism).5 Thus, as colonial medicine extended to everyone, at least in theory, antiepidemic successes can also be viewed as an extension of state encroachments on the bodies (in both health and sickness) of colonized populations. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the new kinds of census data that medical campaigns collected in collaboration with local parish priests to catalogue deaths in the aftermath of epidemics to ensure proper tax collection and track infants and children in need of the advocated medical therapies. In the process, doctors and their allies in local communities helped make large sectors of subject colonial populations visible to the state through the paper trail of intensified census-taking. Census records could then be used for medical ends, such as identifying populations vulnerable to disease, and at the same time could be used to reestablish accurate tribute roles and facilitate colonial tax collection in the aftermath of disease outbreaks, as well as identify those families who refused to allow medical access to their children.6 Despite these extensive and sustained colonial- state directed antiepidemic efforts, when traveler Henry Dunn worked his way through Guatemala and Central America in the late 1820s, it seems that he had little understanding of the impor tant role medicine had played in Central American society and politics in the decades before his arrival. When he wrote about his perceptions of the state of medicine and disease there, he portrayed himself as spreading the knowledge of how to propagate the smallpox vaccine to Central America. Furthermore, Dunn provided vacuna samples obtained from England to medical doctors in Guatemala who were not, from his perspective, up to the task of using it productively: A fine bust of Jenner adorns one of the principal fountains, and serves to keep in remembrance the valuable discovery of which he was the author. Since the Revolution, the propriety of providing a supply of virgin matter has been brought before Congress, and, like everything else, been discussed, agreed to, and neglected. Before I left Guatemala, I delivered to each of their medical men portions of matter from the National Vaccine Institution of England, hermetically sealed, and accompanied them with

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exact directions as to the best way of preserving a constant supply; but such is their ignorance and carelessness, that is highly probable the greater part of it will be wasted.7

This quote from Dunn, his depiction of Guatemalan doctors as undeserving, and his perception that they needed his help of gifts of vacuna supplies and instructions, illustrate the changing global context for the politics of health and disease that began to emerge as Latin America transitioned from colonialism to independent nation-states in the nineteenth century. Dunn’s comments show how concern for health emanated from centers of medical innovation in Europe and the United States in ways that lay bare a new set of power relations: how some parts of the world needed help from others to fight disease, even if those in need of help might appear undeserving—because of their perceived “ignorance” and “carelessness” in Guatemala’s case—in the name of protecting public health on a global scale. These ideas would eventually culminate in, among other things, the eradication of smallpox. Here we find evidence that directly connects the legacies of colonial medicine and their public health campaigns to the ways that “the knowledge frameworks from colonial times continue to influence both who is invited to the policymaking table and how global health agendas are then prioritized” historically and today.8 Finally, the history of medicine in Guatemala also reminds us that we cannot possibly understand the legacies of colonial medicine for the politics of global health without documenting the contributions and influence of indigenous medical cultures, their practitioners, and pharmacopeia.

Notes

Introduction 1. “Real expedición marítima de la vacuna.” This expedition is also named in the documents as “La expedición filantrópica de la vacuna” (The Philanthropic Vaccination Expedition), and as the “Expedición Balmis” (Balmis Expedition), named after its head, Francisco Xavier Balmis. For consistency, I will refer to this as the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition in the text. In late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury colonial Latin America, the word “inoculación” (inoculation) could refer to both the use with human-derived smallpox matter and to vaccination with cowpox after the development of the Jenner vaccine in 1796. This can also be translated into English as variolation and variolization. “Vacuna” (vaccine, vaccination; from the Latin “vacca” [cow]) referred specifically to the use of the cowpox virus to confer immunity to smallpox. As I will be discussing both types of therapies against smallpox, to avoid confusion I will use inoculation or variolation in this work to refer to the use of human smallpox matter and vaccination to refer to the use of cowpox. 2. Carlos Franco-Paredes, Lorena Lammoglia, and José Ignacio Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition to Bring Smallpox Vaccination to the New World and Asia in the Nineteenth Century,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 41:9 (2005): 1285. There is a well- developed literature on this expedition, including Anibal Ruiz Moreno, Introducción de la vacuna en América, expedición Balmis (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1947); Juan B. Lastres, “La viruela, la vacuna y la expedición filantrópica,” Archivos Iberoamericanos de historia de la medicina 2:1 (1950): 85–120; and Rodolfo MacDonald Kanter, “Segundo centenario de la llegada de la vacuna contra la viruela al Reino de Guatemala, 1804–2004,” Anales de la Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala 79 (2004): 183–210. 3. John Tate Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 245.

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4. I will be calling this area “Guatemala” or “colonial Guatemala,” but keep in mind that this encompasses the geographic expanse of the Audiencia of Guatemala and not the much smaller modern nation-state. 5. Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, “Unraveling the Web of Disease,” in Secret Judgments of God: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, 217 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 6. Lovell estimates this child mortality rate from smallpox for the Cuchumatán region of highland Guatemala during the 1780 smallpox epidemic.  W. George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821, 3rd. ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005 [1985]), 156. 7. For outlines of the major events of the introduction of smallpox inoculation to Guatemala in 1780, see Carlos Martínez Durán, Las ciencias médicas en Guatemala: Origen y evolución, 3rd. ed. (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1964), 327–31; Michael M. Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la Vacuna’ in New Spain and Guatemala,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 64:1 (1974): 10–11; and Martha Few, “Circulating Smallpox Knowledge: Guatemalan Doctors, Maya Indians, and Designing Spain’s Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, 1780–1803,” British Journal for the History of Science 43:4 (December 2010), 519–37. The 1780 inoculation campaign will be addressed in more detail in chapter 1, “Epidemic Death and Signs of Life.” 8. Archivo General de Centro América (hereafter AGCA) A1–49–1211, “Sobre cump. to de la Rl. cedula de ereccion del Trib.1 de Protomedicato de esta ciudad, y titulo de primer Protomedico de Dr.  Flores,” 1793, n.p. See also Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 230; John Tate Lanning, The Royal Protomedicato: The Regulation of the Medical Professions in the Spanish Empire, edited by John J. TePaske (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985), 338, 341; and José Aznar López, El doctor don José de Flores: Una vida al servicio de la ciencia (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1960), 68, 102. The name of the title in Spanish is médico de cámara. Francisco Xavier de Balmis, later named head of the expedition, also held this title. 9. In late 1796, Flores received permission to leave Guatemala and travel to Europe to make contact with scientists and medical physicians there. On his way to Europe, he stopped in Havana, Cuba, in February 1797. He then traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in May 1797, where he stayed for one month before sailing for Europe. Between 1797 and 1800, Flores traveled extensively in Europe, meeting with scientists and doctors in Hamburg, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, all while carrying on a lively correspondence about his experiences with colleagues in Guatemala. In 1800, he then settled in Spain. Martínez Durán, Las sciencias médicas en Guatemala, 377; Aznar López, El doctor don José de Flores, 102. Excerpts of Flores’s correspondence with Guatemalan colleagues were published in the Gazeta de Guatemala; see for example the December 11 and December 18, 1797, issues. 10. Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Indiferente General, 1558H: José Flores al Consejo de Indias, 28 febrero 1803, f. 324v. Ultimately, Flores did not participate in the expedition. For a succinct description of Flores’s report, see Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la Vacuna’ in New Spain and Guatemala,” 14. Though

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this source is an exception, most sources from the AGI typically do not list folio numbers. 11. This royal order is printed in the Gazeta de Guatemala, March 12, 1804, 3. There is a well- developed historiography on smallpox variolation and vaccination in colonial settings. See, for colonial North America, Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); for colonial Mexico and Guatemala, see Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la Vacuna’ in New Spain and Guatemala”; for colonial India, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth- Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); for colonial Mauritius, see Megan Vaughan, “Slavery, Smallpox and Revolution: 1792 in Île de France (Mauritius),” Social History of Medicine 13 (2000): 411–28. 12. Franco-Paredes, Lammoglia, and Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition,” 1287–88. Canton is now Guangzhou, China. 13. Quoted in Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 207. Jenner’s remarks of surprise might be based on stereotypes of the Spanish found in the Black Legend and European perceptions that Spain lagged behind other European states in scientific and medical innovation. This contemporary perception about the Spanish and Portuguese empires, that they did not make significant contributions to the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment science, has carried over into the historiography of these topics as well, an important point that Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has consistently raised in his research. See for example Cañizares-Esguerra’s How to Write a History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Nature, Empire and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); and “Spanish America: From Baroque to Modern Colonial Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth- Century Science, edited by Roy Porter, 718–38 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Antonio Barrera- Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Navarro Brotons, ed., Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution/ Más alla de la Leyenda Negra: España y la Revolución Científica (Valencia, Spain: Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia, 2007); and Daniela Bleichmar et al., eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 14. Small stores of smallpox, however, still remain in laboratories in the United States and Russia. 15. For an interesting critique of the use of smallpox-eradication campaigns as models for other eradication programs see Anne-Emmanuelle Birn, “Small(pox) success?,” Ciência e saúde colectiva 16:2 (2011): 591–97. 16. Note also that Balmis, who ultimately led the vaccination expedition, had twice visited Mexico for extended periods. While there, he appropriated a supposed cure for venereal disease from the healer Nicolás Viana (“El Beato”) made from begonia and agave plants. Balmis conducted a series of experiments using the plants in Mexico, and then published his findings in Europe. He did this despite the controversies that surrounded the efficacy of the cure. Thus, the people who implemented the expedition were not only conversant with the New World, many had extensive connections

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with it. Francisco Xavier de Balmis, Demostración de las eficaces virtudes nuevamente descubiertas en las raíces de dos plantas de Nueva España, especies de ágave y begónia (Madrid: La Viuda de Joaquín Ibarra, 1794). For information on the salary that Balmis received during his visit to New Spain in pursuit of this cure, see Wellcome Library, WMS Amer. 62, a photocopy of the original royal order of March 29, 1794. 17. I received many helpful suggestions at the early stages of the development of my ideas on circulation from the participants at the UCLA/Clark Library symposium “Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science” in October 2007, especially from Mary Terrall and Kapil Raj. Essays from the symposium are gathered in a special issue in the British Journal for the History of Science 43 (2010). See especially Kapil Raj, “Introduction: Circulation and Locality in Early Modern Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 43 (2010), 513–17. 18. This is a large field; see for example Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Antonio Barrera- Osorio, Experiencing Nature; Daniela Bleichmar, “Circulating Natural Knowledge in the Spanish Empire,” in Navarro Brotons, ed. Beyond the Black Legend; Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write a History of the New World; James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640,” American Historical Review 112:5 (December 2007), 1359–85. 19. Two examples among many of critiques of the center-periphery model are Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); and Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002). For an alternate view, see Sylvia Sellers- García, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 20. On the importance of the Audiencia of Guatemala and its capital Santiago de Guatemala, see Christopher H. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala: City, Caste and Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). For recent historical and ethnohistorical works that focus on other impor tant regions for the history of colonial New Spain, see for the Yucatán especially Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Grant D. Jones, Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); John Chuchiak, “The Medicinal Practices of the Yucatec Maya and their Influence on Colonial Medicine in Yucatán, 1580–1780,” Acta Americana 10:1–2 (2006): 32–57; and Ryan Kashanipour’s “A World of Cures: Yucatec Healing in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2012). See also impor tant recent work examining frontiers and borderlands on the edges of empires, such as Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in

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Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); David Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); and Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 21. Between 1704 and 1821, the University of San Carlos conferred bachelor’s degrees in medicine to thirty persons, the licentiate to twelve, and the doctorate to twelve. Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 211. 22. See Méthodo de la inoculacion de las viruelas que refiere M. de la Condaminé en su celebre Memoria, sobre dicha Inoculacion, leída en la Asemblea Real de las Ciencias de Paris el 24 de abril de 1754 (Nueva Guatemala: A. Sánchez Cubillas, 1780). 23. See José Flores, Específico nuevamente descubierto en el Reyno de Goatemala, para la curación radical del horrible mal de cancro (Mexico, DF: D. Felipe de Zuñiga y Ontiverso, 1782). This work was published in Italian translation as Del maraviglioso specifico delle lucertole o ramarri per la radical cura del cancro, della lebbra, e lue venerea (Torini, Italy: Presso L’editore, 1784). For more on printing in Guatemala, see José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Guatemala (1660–1821) (Guatemala, CA: Tipografía Nacional de Guatemala, 1960). 24. Jordana Dym, “Conceiving Central America: A Bourbon Public in the Gaceta de Guatemala (1797–1807),” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1850, edited by Gabriel Paquette, 105 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 25. Gazeta de Guatemala, volume 1 (February 13, 1797–January 1, 1798). Printed by D. Ignacio Beteta. This beginning section of volume 1 is not paginated. The first subscribers to the Gazeta when it began in 1797 were from Central America, Mexico, and Spain. Over the decades leading to independence in the 1810s, the subscription list expanded to readers in other areas of the Americas and Europe. 26. Dym, “Conceiving Central America.” For comparison, see Rebecca Earle, “Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada,” The Americas 54:2 (October 1997): 167–84. She argues that printed sources and the press were not the main way that news and public opinions circulated in New Granada, with its lack of printing presses and large illiterate population. Instead, new political ideas spread through letter writing, travel, and rumor networks. See also Victor M. Uribe-Urán, “The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:4 (April 2000): 425–57. Uribe-Uran finds the emergence of what he calls “at least an incipient public sphere” (425) in parts of Latin America at the end of the colonial period, one that continued to grow during the independence wars in the 1810s, and for another thirty years after. He challenges those who argue that the development of the public sphere in colonial Latin America in the decade leading up to the wars of independence was somehow hindered by its large illiterate population and lack of circulation of political and revolutionary ideas in print. 27. The full name of this organization was the Royal Economic Society of Lovers of the Homeland of Guatemala (La Real Sociedad de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala). The group later changed its name to the Economic Society of Friends of the

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Nation of Guatemala (La Real Sociedad Económica de Amigos de la Patria de Guatemala). For clarity, I will call it the Royal Economic Society. For an excellent history of the society, see Elisa Luque Alcaide, La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País de Guatemala (Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1962). For more on the economic societies in Spain and the Americas in comparative perspective, see Robert Jones Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World, 1763–1821 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958). 28. Católogo de los individuos que componen la Real Sociedad de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala en el año de 1799, n.p. There is no publication information except at the end: “En junta de 20 diciembre último se acordó dar a la prensa el antecedente catálogo. Nueva Guatemala 1 de marzo 1799, [signed] Sebastian Melón, Ex Secretario.” 29. Junta pública de la Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala, celebrada en 12 de diciembre de 1796 (Nueva Guatemala: Oficina que dirige D. Alexo Mariano Bracamonte, 1796), 2. 30. “La Ilustración” is also the Spanish term for the Enlightenment. Octava junta pública de la Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala, celebrada el dia 12 de agosto de 1811 (Nueva Guatemala: Beteta, Impresor de la Sociedad, 1811), 30. 31. Ibid., 31. 32. The Gabinete de Historia Natural was formally established in December of 1796. Noticia del establecimiento del museo de esta capital de la Nueva Guatemala, y exercicios públicos de historia natural . . . ([Nueva] Guatemala: La Viuda de D. Sebastián Arévalo, 1797), 2. 33. Ibid., 11. 34. Ibid., 17. 35. Ibid. 36. For a comparative look at the history of modernizing medicine and early public health in the Andes during the Bourbon era, see Adam Warren’s impor tant work Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). 37. Other scholars of colonial Latin America have noted how elites there absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment and then created local expressions in intellectual cultures. See for example Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write a History of the New World. 38. My argument about Guatemala’s medical cultures is in agreement with Jordana Dym’s findings that Guatemala’s Gazeta targeted a readership and a civil society she describes as a Bourbon, rather than creole, public. See Dym, “Conceiving Central America,” 105. 39. For my point that Guatemala participated in an internationalism through humanitarianism applied to colonial public health campaigns, I draw on Liisa Malkki’s insight that “internationalism is fruitfully explored as a transnational cultural form for imagining and ordering difference among people, and as a moralizing discursive practice—and that one of the moral under pinnings of dominant discourses of internationalism is the ritualized and institutionalized evocation of a common humanity” (41). Liisa Malkki, “Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations,” Diaspora 3:1 (1994): 41–68. For the importance of the creole-peninsular divide in late colonial and early national politics and economics for Central America,

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see especially Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteco (Guatemala, CA: Editorial Universitaria, 1970) and the recent translation of this influential work into English in Severo Martínez Peláez, La Patria del Criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala, translated by W. George Lovell and Christopher Lutz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided, 3rd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially chapter  3, “Bourbon Central America,” and chapter 4, “Expectations and Achievements of Independence”; and Miles L. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680–1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). For creole patriotism in Mexico, see David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); for creole science and epistemology in Mexico, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write a History of the New World. 40. Quoted in Lanning, The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, 232. 41. Humanitarian discourses in relation to colonial medicine as practiced in the Enlightenment in Central America and elsewhere in Spanish America could also be seen as a historical precursor to modern efforts and debates regarding health as a right of citizens of individual nation states, health as a human right, and more broadly for debates about illness and social inequalities. See for example the work of Paul Farmer, including Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 42. Balmis did not travel to Guatemala himself; he sent his representative Francisco Pastor to the capital with vaccination manuals, supplies, and samples of cowpox lymph. 43. AGCA A1–2818–24919, “Auto acordado sobre la fiesta de tabla por el felis exito de la bacuna” (June 16, 1804), f. 1v. 44. Note that Puerto Rico also obtained the vaccine and began inoculation programs in advance of the arrival of the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition. See José G. Rigau-Pérez, “Smallpox Epidemics in Puerto Rico during the Pre-vaccine Era (1518–1803),” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 37 (1982): 423–38. Works that provide succinct accounts of the introduction of the Jenner vaccine to Guatemala include Lanning, The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos, 253–57; Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición,’ ” 25, 52; MacDonald Kanter, “Segundo centernario de la llegada de la vacuna.” 45. See for example David Wade Chambers and Richard Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge,” Osiris 15 (2001), 221–40; and Paquette, ed., Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies. 46. The work of Chambers and Gillespie, “Locality in the History of Science,” was influential to my conceptualization of this issue. 47. Where possible I try and distinguish between these medical cultures, but often the sources available do not allow me to make such fine-tuned distinctions. One of the silences in the sources includes African and Afro-Latin American medical cultures in Guatemala’s Audiencia at this time. Ryan Kashnipour, however, has been able to document African, black, and mulato healers active in colonial Yucatán. See Kashanipour, “A World of Cures.” As medicine began to modernize in eighteenth- century Guatemala, discourses constructed indigenous and gendered medical knowledges as

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important to counteract but rarely included references to African medical cultures despite Guatemala’s large black populations. 48. Sandra Orellana, Indian Medicine in Highland Guatemala: The Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Periods (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 71. 49. “Grandes adivinos y médicos.” AGCA A1–4060–3160 (1687). Chinautla is located to the north of Guatemala City. 50. For more on the curandero sangradores from Chinautla, see Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives, especially chapter 4, “Illness, Healing, and the Supernatural World,” 69–99. In this earlier work I was more interested in evidence related to the religious and criminal policing of these specialists. Here I use this source to uncover and analyze the details of their medical specialization as curandero sangradores. 51. AGCA A1–4060–3160 (1687), f. 42v. 52. Ibid., f. 41. 53. See for example “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos en la jurisdicción de Sololá, 1819,” Boletín del Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco de Paula García Peláez” 1:3 (1989): 121–32. 54. Francisco Ximénez, Historia natural del reino de Guatemala [1722] (Guatemala, CA: José Pineda Ibarra, 1967). Cited in Orellana, Indian Medicine, 73. 55. Ximénez, Historia natural, 329. 56. “Mugeres melindrosas.” Ximénez, Historia natural, 330. 57. David Sowell, The Tale of Healer Miguel Perdomo Neira: Medicine, Ideologies, and Power in the Nineteenth- Century Andes (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2001); Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight Against Smallpox, 1518– 1824 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015); Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). For key works that focus on African and black medicinal cultures in the colonial New World, see for example Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, El negro esclavo en Nueva España: La formación colonial, la medicina popular, y otros ensayos (Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994); Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth- Century Saint Domingue (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Joan Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); and James H. Sweet, Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 58. See Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Megan Vaughn, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Steven Feierman, “Explanation and Uncertainty in the Medical World of Ghaambo,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000): 317–44; and Steven Feierman and John M. Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For colonial India, see Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 59. There are more such examples, which I consider in detail in later chapters. José Flores, Instrucción sobre el modo de practicar la inoculación de las viruelas, y método

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para curar esta enfermedad, acomodado a la naturaleza, y modo de vivir de los indios del Reyno de Guatemala (Nueva Guatemala: D. Ignacio Beteta, 1794); and José Antonio de Córdova, Cartilla que enseña el modo de vacunar, y distinguir la verdadera y falsa vacuna: Extraída de las instrucciones y periódocos de Europa, y acomodada a la simplicidad de los Indios ([Nueva] Guatemala: s.n., 1804?). 60. For more on this process viewed through the eighteenth-century science of medicinal lizards, see Miruna Achim, Lagartijas medicinales: Remedios americanos y debates científicos en la Ilustración (Mexico, DF: Consejo Nacional para La Cultura y Las Artes, 2008). 61. Flores, Específico nuevamente descubierto en el Reyno de Goatemala; and Balmis, Demostración de las eficaces. See Achim, Lagartijas medicinales, for more on Flores’s contribution to the scientific debates on the medical properties of some of Guatemala’s lizards. 62. Martínez Durán, Las Ciencias Médicas, 344. Lanning, The University of San Carlos in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment called Herrarte’s report “one of the most important reports on the plants, botany and trees of Guatemala sent back to Spain” (162). 63. Wellcome Library: Mariano José Herrarte, 1784, “A return describing plants of medicinal value used by the Indians of Guatemala.” Seven manuscript notebooks, numbered 40–46, not paginated. While the document is handwritten in Spanish, the Wellcome’s title for Herrarte’s work is given in English. The quote is from notebook 40: “Los yndios que poseen muchos secretos de esta naturaleza derivados por tradición de sus antepasados y los conservan para la curación de sus enfermedades.” 64. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 65. See for example the work of Francisco Hernández in Historia de las plantas de Nueva España (Mexico, DF: Imprenta Universitaria, 1942–56) and Antigüedades de la Nueva España (Madrid: Historia 16, 1986). 66. Christopher Lutz estimates that in the 1750s, Santiago de Guatemala had a population of 38,300, 5,400 of who were Indians living in either the inner barrios or in one of the four outer settlements of Jocotenango, San Felipe, Santa Isabel, or San Cristobal. See Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 110. 67. José Quer, Flora española, 4 vols. (Madrid: J. Ibarra, 1762–64). 68. “Pero podra servir de alguna luz,” Wellcome Library: Herrarte, 1784, “A return describing plants of medicinal value used by the Indians of Guatemala,” notebook 40, n.p. 69. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Kansas City: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 5. 70. AGI Guatemala 648, carta al Exmo. Sr. Ministro de Gracia y Justica de España e Yndias de Francisco Sebastián Chamorro, 3 marzo 1800, n.p. 71. Warren, in Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru, also finds this in colonial Lima. See also Adam Warren, “An Operation for Evangelization: Friar Francisco González Laguna, the Cesarean Section, and Fetal Baptism in Late Colonial Peru,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83:4 (2009): 650. 72. Lanning, The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, 85–86. Lanning thinks that he probably used the pseudonym “Bondesir.” The use of pseudonyms in other Gazetas was fairly common in the eighteenth century. For more on the Royal

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Economic Society in Chiapas, see Shafer, The Economic Societies of the Spanish World, 248–49. 73. Lanning, The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, xxiv. Other Spanish and American-born male religious who attacked Buffon on this point were P. Juan Nuiz, Francisco Clavijero, Benito Feijóo, and Alexander von Humboldt. 74. For more on this, see Martha Few, “The ‘Problem’ of Indian Clothing in Guatemala at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” in Flowers for the Earth Lord: Guatemalan Textiles from the Permanent Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, edited by Traci Ardren, 141–50 (Miami: University of Miami Press and Lowe Art Museum, 2006). The contest guidelines can be found in the Gazeta de Guatemala, March 27, 1797, 55. For the published version of the plan, see Matías de Córdoba, Utilidades de que todos los indios y ladinos se vistan y calcen a la española, y medios de conseguirlo sin violencia, coacción ni mandato. Memoria premiada por la Real Sociedad Económica de Guatemala en 13 de diciembre 1797 (Nueva Guatemala: La imprenta de D. Ignacio Betata, 1798). 75. This is addressed in detail in chapter 3, “Constructing Colonial Fetuses.” 76. AGCA A1.1–16–624 (1794), “Sobre viruelas,” f. 2. 77. Flores, Instrucción, 3. 78. Ibid. 79. AGI, Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1802), 331. 80. Ibid., 332. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 332–32v. The capitalization is in the original. 83. Paula De Vos also finds an emphasis on both science and charity in her study of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century apothecaries in hospitals in Mexico: “The juxtaposition of science and conscience, and of public health and charity, demonstrate the medicalization of hospitals and the professionalization of medicine could be achieved without sacrificing ‘theological virtues.’ ” Paula De Vos, “The Apothecary in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century New Spain: Historiography and Case Studies in Medical Regulation, Charity, and Science,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review (Summer 2004): 284. 84. See Flores, Instrucción, for his argument that Indians were more susceptible to epidemic disease. For a newspaper article describing pregnancy as causing a “fragile state” in women, see Gazeta de Guatemala, May 13, 1799, 31–32. 85. It is important to keep in mind that even though colonial political and medical elites portrayed inoculation as “modern” and as evidence that Guatemala successfully implemented the innovations of Enlightenment science, this procedure had in fact existed for many years, and was only new in Guatemala and elsewhere in Spanish America in the sense that it was recently adopted there. And, as public health campaigns in colonial Central America expanded from smallpox to include, for example, typhus and measles treatments, no such innovations or cures had yet occurred in combatting those illnesses. In fact, these medical officials and their entourages who participated in those campaigns continued to advocate medical procedures such as bloodletting as a cure for illnesses such as typhus, which further weakened the patient.

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Chapter 1 1. Kaqchikel Chronicles: The Definitive Edition, translated and exegesis by Judith M. Maxwell and Robert M. Hill II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 246–48. The Xajil Chronicle, thought to have been written in the seventeenth century, forms one component of a corpus of Kaqchikel Maya–language documents also known collectively as the “Annals of the Kaqchikel.” 2. Note that it is nearly impossible to provide an accurate diagnosis of a par ticular epidemic disease from the often vague descriptions found in colonial archival sources, e.g., “sore-sickness” from the Kaqchikel account. See Cook and Lovell’s “Unraveling the Web of Disease” for an excellent discussion of the difficulties that historians face using colonial archival sources to categorize colonial- era diseases in modern terms in their edited volume Secret Judgments of God, 213–42. 3. AGI, Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1803), f. 325v. 4. For a comprehensive overview of the historiography of indigenous depopulation due to epidemic disease, see “Appendix: The Demographic Debate” in Suzanne Austin Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 147–72. In Central America as elsewhere in colonial Latin America, the effects of epidemic disease on native peoples varied regionally and temporally. See for example Cook and Lovell, Secret Judgments of God, especially their introduction; Linda A. Newson, The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras under Spanish Rule (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986); Linda A. Newson, Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); and W. George Lovell, “ ‘Heavy Shadows and Black Night’: Disease and Depopulation in Colonial Spanish America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82:3 (September 1992): 426, 427. For a comprehensive overview and bibliography of the demographic historiography for colonial Central America to 1995, see W. George Lovell and Christopher Lutz, eds., Demography and Empire: A Guide to the Population History of Spanish Central America, 1500–1821 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). 5. The literature on epidemics, including virgin soil epidemics, and their effect on Amerindian populations in the Americas is extensive. See for example the pioneering article of Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 33:2 (April 1976): 288–99; and Alchon, A Pest in the Land. 6. W. George Lovell and Christopher  H. Lutz, “Conquest and Population: Maya Demography in Historical Perspective,” Latin American Research Review 29:2 (1994), 134. 7. Lovell and Lutz, “Conquest and Population,” 133; and W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz, “ ‘A Dark Obverse,’ Maya Survival in Guatemala: 1520–1994” Geographical Review 86:3 (1996): 400. Lovell and Lutz’s broader argument in “ ‘A Dark Obverse’ ” is that despite this catastrophic decline, today the Maya population in Guatemala remain demographically resilient and number more than twice the population at European contact, or some four million Maya people. 8. While there is much important recent research on African and black slave, freed, and free populations in colonial Central America, I have had a difficult time documenting African and black medical cultures in the extant written sources of

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antiepidemic and public health campaigns for the late colonial period. This is in part because much of the public health campaigns focused on areas of majority indigenous populations in the central and western Guatemalan highlands and on issues of pregnancy and reproduction, a concern that did not often extend to poor Africans and blacks, whether free, freed, or slave. There are some exceptions to this, and I note this evidence when I find it. This would be a fruitful area for future research. 9. My thinking on historical conceptions of humanitarianism and the development of new ideas in colonial Central America about who deserves health and medical treatment through public health campaigns is influenced by ongoing conversations and work with Liz Oglesby at the University of Arizona and through the work of Paul Farmer, especially Infections and Inequalities; Anthony Pagden, especially his article “Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Europe’s Imperial Legacy,” Political Theory 31:2 (April 2003): 171–99; and by recent scholarship that looks to nineteenth- century colonialism and liberation movements and their contribution to modern conceptions of human rights, especially in Africa, as in the work of Bonnie Ibhawoh, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). See also Mary Ann Glendon, “The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the Universal Human Rights Idea,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 27–39; and Paolo G. Carozza, “ ‘They Are Our Brothers, and Christ Gave His Life for Them’: The Catholic Tradition and the Idea of Human Rights in Latin America,” Logos 6:4 (Fall 2003): 81–103. 10. AGI Guatemala 10, Fiscal Lic. Eugenio de Salazar al Rey, Guatemala: 13 March 1577, quoted in Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 244. See also Murdo MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 98. Lutz has a helpful epidemic time line, “Epidemic Disease in Santiago and Environs 1519–1769,” in Santiago de Guatemala, 243–52. 11. AGI Guatemala 12, Dr. Alonso Criado de Castilla a su Magestad (Guatemala: November 30, 1680), quoted in Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 245; MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 98. 12. AGI Guatemala 29, carta de Presidente D. Enríquez a su Magestad, Santiago de Guatemala, 10 noviembre 1684, n.p. Enríquez governed as president of the Audiencia of Guatemala from 1684 to 1688 and then returned to Spain where he took a seat on the Supremo Consejo de Guerra. Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala (Guatemala, CA: Fundación para la Cultura y el Desarrollo Asociación de Amigos del País, 2004), 372. 13. AGI Guatemala 29, carta de Presidente D. Enríquez a su Magestad, Santiago de Guatemala (November 10, 1684), n.p. 14. Ibid. 15. AGI Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1803), f. 326v. 16. Ximénez, Historia natural, 180. 17. Isagoge histórica apologética de las Indias Occidentales y especial de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala de la orden de predicadores (Guatemala, CA: Tipografía Nacional, 1935), 290–91, quoted in Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 248. 18. AGI Guatemala 409 (May 6, 1777). 19. AGI Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1803), f. 327.

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20. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 249. A fanega equals 116 pounds. It is unclear whether this measures shelled corn or corn on the cob. 21. Ibid., 249–50. 22. Ibid., 249. 23. Antonio de Molina, Antigua Guatemala: Memorias del M. R. P. maestro Fray Antonio de Molina continuadas y marginadas por Fray Agustín Cano y Fray Francisco Ximénez, de la Orden de Santo Domingo (Guatemala, CA: Unión Tipográfica, 1943), 44. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. The viaticum is a ritual where the Eucharist is conducted when a person is thought to be at or near death. 26. Described as “[en] peligro de muerte.” Thanks to Michael Brescia for discussing this with me. Other groups deemed in danger of immanent death who also should receive last rights are those entering a military battle, those undertaking dangerous or long ocean voyages, those condemned to death by the legal system, and certain women during difficult childbirths. See Francisco Xavier Lascano, Indice práctico-moral para los sacerdotes que auxilian moribundos (Originally published in Mexico City and reprinted in [Santiago de] Guatemala, Joachin de Arévalo, 1754), 2. 27. This is the Santo Cristo de la Catedral. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 245. 28. This was called Processión de Sangre. 29. Everything in this paragraph comes from Molina, Antigua Guatemala, 44–45. 30. AGCA A1–4026–30980 (1694), n.p. This letter was written to the president of the Audiencia and was also reviewed and later approved by Santiago de Guatemala’s cabildo. 31. The human rights literature can again be helpful here. Amy Ross’s discussion of what bodies count in human rights violations as a way to analyze understandings of state directed violence helped me think about the themes that emerged in the narratives of dead bodies and mass graves in epidemic accounts. This theme will be taken up in subsequent chapters, including how this informed the rhetoric and practice of humanitarianism in relation the living and dead bodies of different social groups, including pregnant women and fetuses, in colonial Central American public health campaigns. See Amy Ross, “The Body Counts: Civilian Casualties and the Crisis of Human Rights,” in Human Rights Crisis, edited by Alice Bullard, 35–47 (Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 32. AGCA A1–4026–30980 (1694), n.p. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Here I deliberately use the phrase “ritual specialist” to describe both Spanish priests and Maya healers because both combined what we would call religious labor with medical labor in public and private displays of their specialized power, even though they themselves did not make distinctions between the two. 37. For more on the rituals used by priests at the time of death in this time period, see Lascano, Indice práctico-moral. 38. The Spanish verb used in the sources to refer to this activity is adivinar. 39. The 1577 Relaciones Geográficas for Mexico and Guatemala, some of which include maps, are held at the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of

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Texas at Austin. For more on the importance of the Relaciones as colonial ethnohistorical sources, see Robert C. West, “The Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Central America, 1740–1792,” in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 12: Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Part One, edited by Howard  F. Cline, 396–449 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972). 40. Ray F. Broussard, “Description of Atitlán and Its Dependencies, 1585: A Translation with Introduction and Notes” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1952), 54. 41. Ibid., 85. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 109. 44. For more on the central role of self-bloodletting and ritual power in Maya cultures, see Linda Schele and Mary Miller, Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (New York: G. Braziller and Kimbell Art Museum, 1986); and Peter Sigal, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 45. Broussard, “Description of Atitlán and Its Dependencies, 1585,” 130. 46. Ibid., 129. 47. Francisco Antonio Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida (Guatemala, CA: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia, 1932–33), 3:399–401. Fuentes y Guzmán was born in Santiago de Guatemala in 1643, held political positions as an alcalde in Santiago de Guatemala, alcalde mayor of Totonicapán, and later in Sosonate. 48. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida, 3:400. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 3:399–401. 51. From 1625 to 1637, the Dominican priest Thomas Gage spent twelve years living and working in Chiapas and Guatemala. 52. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West-India’s or the English American his Travail (London, 1655; originally published 1648), 167. Gage identifies her as “Martha de Carillo,” rather than using the Spanish version of the name (Marta). 53. Francisco Vázquez, Crónica de la Provincia del Santíssimo nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la Orden de N. Seráfico Padre San Francisco en el Reino de la Nueva España, 4 vols. [1714–16] (Guatemala City: Tipografia Nacional, 1937), 4:313. Vázquez did not name the niece. Today the town of Zamayac is known as Samayac, a municipio in the department of Sacatepéquez. Born in Santiago de Guatemala in 1647, Vázquez was a member of the Franciscan order and wrote this work between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Diccionario Histórico Biográfico de Guatemala, 921. 54. In Central America and elsewhere in New Spain, cofradías provided a significant outlet for indigenous religious cultures and community-based self-help under Spanish colonial rule. 55. For a discussion for the major features of this genre in colonial New Spain, see Martha Few, “ ‘Our Lord Entered His Body’: Miraculous Healing and Children’s Bodies in Colonial New Spain,” in Religion in New Spain: Varieties of Colonial Religious Experience, edited by Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole, 114–24 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). For an example of a miraculous healing and resurrection account from eighteenth- century Spain with similar elements of the genre,

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see Relación de la prodigiosa restauración á la vida de un niño tenido por defuncto, executada al contacto de una reliquía del Apostól de las Indias San Francisco Xavier, de la Compañía de Jesús, en la ciudad de Xérez. Año de 1740 (Mexico, DF: Colegio Real de San Ildefonso, 1748). 56. Vázquez, Crónica, 4:313. 57. Francis Gall, Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala (Guatemala, CA: Instituto Tipografía Nacional/Instituto Geográfico Nacional, 1980), 3:178. 58. Ibid., 179. 59. “Agoreros, curanderos y maleficos.” Pedro Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral de la diocésis de Goathemala (Guatemala, CA : Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1958), 2:156. 60. Ibid., 2:157. 61. Note here that I have updated the spelling of the Maya ethnic groups. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:156. Cortés y Larraz asked that the book be turned over to him. The source, however, provides no further information on the matter. 62. Gall, Diccionario geográfico, 179; Vázquez, Crónica, 4:313. 63. We saw this, for example, earlier in this chapter in the Relaciones Geográficas that described ritual divination to predict the arrival of epidemic diseases. See also AGCA A1–2804–24640 (1800). 64. One of the more well-known examples of this is the 1712 apparition in Chiapas of the Virgin Mary, who spoke in Tzeltal Maya to a young woman named María López. This apparition began the chain of events that culminated in the first regional Maya rebellion under Spanish colonial rule. For more, see Kevin Gosner, Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 65. For clarity I will refer to the illness as cumatz. For recent research on this epidemic disease, see for example  W. George Lovell, “Disease in Early Colonial Guatemala,” in Cook and Lovell, eds., Secret Judgments of God, 71; John S. Marr and James B. Kiracofe, “Was the Huey Cocoliztli a Haemorrhagic Fever?,” Medical History 44 (2000): 341–62; Rodolfo Acuna- Soto et  al., “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:4 (April 2002): 360–62; Rodolfo Acuna- Soto et al., “When Half of the Population Died: The Epidemic of Hemorrhagic Fevers of 1576 in Mexico,” FEMS Microbiology Letters 240 (2004): 1–5; and Rodolfo Acuna- Soto et al, “Drought, Epidemic Disease, and the Fall of Classic Period Cultures in Mesoamerica (AD 750–950): Hemorrhagic Fevers as a Cause of Massive Population Loss,” Medical Hypotheses 65:2 (2005): 405–9. The Valley of Guatemala here refers to the corregimiento (jurisdiction) of the Valley of Guatemala. 66. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:402. 67. The information that I have been able to glean about the development of worship of San Pascual Bailón in the colonial period comes from two sources: Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida, 3:401–3; and Vázquez, Crónica, 4:308–14. For the perseverance of San Pascual Bailón to the present day, see for example Jorge Luján Muñoz, “The Persistance of Smalltown Saints,” Américas 23:5 (1971): 10–15; Carlos Navarrete, “Orígenes del culto a San Pascual Bailón-Muerte en el sur de Mesoamérica,” Arqueología Mexicana 7:40 (1999): 52–57; Christopher James MacKenzie,

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“Religion, Community, and Identity: Perspectives on the Cult of San Simón in Guatemala” (master’s thesis, University of Alberta, 1998). 68. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:401. 69. Vázquez, Crónica, 4:154. 70. Ibid., 4:308; Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:401. 71. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:401. 72. Ibid., 3:402. 73. Today, this town is known San Antonio Aguascalientes, a municipio located in the Departmento de Sacatepéquez. 74. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:402. 75. Gall, Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala, 3:213. 76. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:402. 77. See for example William Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). See also Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995). Retablos are individual stories of thanks that depict the intercession of a supernatural being (e.g., the Virgin Mary or a par ticular saint) and impending death from illness. 78. There are many other examples of apparitions that appeared to Indians. See also the Virgin of Guadalupe apparition accounts in addition to the example of María López above. 79. The Indian man spoke to the apparition “in his way” (a su modo), most likely in Kaqchikel Maya, the language of the ethnic group that dominated the town of San Antonio Aguascalientes in the mid-seventeenth century. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:402. For more on San Antonio Aguascalientes, see Gall, Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala, 3:213. 80. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:402. Note similar apparition account details in Vázquez, Crónica, 4:308–9. 81. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:402–3. 82. Ibid., 403. 83. Vázquez, Crónica, 4:308. 84. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:403. 85. Vázquez, Crónica, 4:308. 86. Ibid.; Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:403. 87. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:403. 88. Ibid. I have not been able to locate any materials among Inquisition sources that relate to this issue. 89. Ibid. Vázquez also noted that the ban on worshipping San Pascual was not fully effective. Indians in that area continued to celebrate San Pasqual Bailón’s annual fiesta; at the very least, mass would be said in his honor. Vázquez, Crónica, 4:309. 90. Cortés y Larraz (1712–86) was born in the town of Belchite in Zaragoza, Spain. He occupied the post of archbishop of Guatemala from 1768 to 1779. 91. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:34. 92. Ibid., 1:31. 93. Ibid., 1:29, 34, 82, 2:134; and “Sobre averiguar la forma en que se celebran los velorios de los párvulos en el pueblo de Santiago de Apastaque. Año de 1769,” Boletín del Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco de Paula García Peláez” 3:2 (1993): 83–87. A special thanks to Cory Schott for bringing this source to my attention.

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94. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:82, 110. 95. Ibid., 1:82. 96. Ibid., 1:108, 110. 97. Ibid., 1:31, 110. 98. Ibid., 1:110. 99. There are many examples of these local and itinerant musicians in “Sobre averiguar la forma,” 83–87. 100. Ibid., 84–86. For more on dances popular at eighteenth- century Central American social gatherings, see Cory Schott, “Frontiers and Fandangos: Reforming Colonial Nicaragua” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2014). 101. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:82, 108, 110; and AGN, Ramo de Inquisición, vol. 540, exp. 22, fs. 270 ([Santiago de] Guatemala, 1698), f. 230. 102. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:29. 103. Ibid., 1:34. For wakes in Caluco and the surrounding towns, see 1:82; for the towns of Apopa and Nexapa, see 1:108; and for the capital of Santiago de Guatemala, see 1:29, 34. 104. “Sobre averiguar la forma,” 84. 105. Ibid., 83–87. The infant wakes attracted the attention of the town’s parish priest, Manuel Lorenzo Zurita, who reported on the wakes and their participants to Cortés y Larraz on the basis of information given to him by Victoriano Vega, the town’s Indian fiscal menor, and from questioning participants—parents, grandparents, and neighbors of the dead infants—as well as some of the musicians who performed at the wakes. 106. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:42; 2:61. 107. “Sobre averiguar la forma,” 85. Cortés y Larraz describes this 1769 measles outbreak, but no specific disease or cause is given to explain this cluster of infant wakes. 108. “Sobre averiguar la forma,” 84–85. 109. Ibid., 85. 110. Ibid., 84–85. 111. Ibid., 86. 112. AGCA A1–5398–45902, “Venta de cera,” Comalapa 1707, n.p. 113. These flowers were also called flores amarillo. Ximénez, Historia natural, 310. 114. “Dice el cura en sus respuestas, que el exceso que hay es el de sahumarios que usan en la puerta de la iglesia, altares, sepulturas y selvas; lo que se tiene por abuso idolátrico.” Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:105. 115. Ximénez, Historia natural, 246. 116. “Y porque nunca lo hacen, aprehendieron los indios que fue para infec[c]ionarlos con el humo. Se conmovió el pueblo hasta tomar armas para matarlo y Dios lo libró, porque dos indios comenzaron a altercar entre sí y entonces las mujeres lo cogieron a su cargo y llevaron a casa.” Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:94. 117. “Una constelación de sarampión.” Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográficomoral, 2:61; Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala, 308. 118. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:61. Cortés y Larraz did not name the junta members for the 1769 outbreak. The official treatment guidelines that circulated in printed form can be found in AGCA A1.4.10–271–5909, Método, que se ha de observar en la curación de sarampión y viruelas formado de Orden del Superior Govierno . . . A que acompaña el despacho dirigido a su observancia ([Santiago de Guatemala]: J. de Arévalo, 1769). A photocopy of the original pamphlet can be found in the Francisco Guerra Collection at Wellcome Library.

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119. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:61. 120. Ibid., 2:61–62. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid., 2:62. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 2:61. Frank M. Cresson Jr. describes how in the 1930s, Maya residents of Milpa Alta in Mexico continued to use temascales to treat smallpox victims. Frank M. Cresson Jr., “Maya and Mexican Sweat Houses,” American Anthropologist 40:1 (January–March 1938): 99. 125. AGCA, A1.4.10- 271–5909. 126. The Protomedicato, the colonial institution that regulated medicine and medical practice in colonial New Spain, was not formally established in the Audiencia of Guatemala until 1793. Until that time, the ayuntamiento, the city council of the capital Santiago de Guatemala, and after the 1773 earthquake, Nueva Guatemala, took over responsibility for health-related issues. Historian John Tate Lanning notes that throughout the seventeenth century, however, various medical doctors did claim the title of protomédico. Furthermore, in the eighteenth century, the president of the Audiencia of Guatemala awarded this title to various medical doctors before the formal Protomedicato came into existence there, including Vicente Ferrer González (1711), Joseph de Medina (1733), and Manuel de Ávalos y Porras (1747). Lanning, The EighteenthCentury Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos, 222, 228n13; Martínez Durán, Las ciencias médicas en Guatemala, 217. For a study of the Protomedicato in colonial Guatemala in comparative perspective, see Marianne Samayoa, “Shaping Health Care in Post- Colonial Latin America: Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba in Transition” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, in progress). 127. This official is not named in the documents. The cures and medical recetas suggest that the authors built on Enlightenment- era understandings and treatment of these diseases with some interventions that reflect Guatemala- specific healing materials such as dirt from the Black Christ of Esquipulas sanctuary/shrine. It was not uncommon for Guatemalan medical doctors and others to publish guides on curing disease that included the work of other foreign authors (here Mexican and European) mixed with cures or therapies reflecting Guatemala’s need and medical flora and fauna found in the region. See for example Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas que refiere M. de la Condaminé published in Nueva Guatemala in 1780. This publication is a reprint of the French manual, and it includes an inserted printed additional note on pages 4 and 5, dated Nueva Guatemala, August 22, 1780, that describes the local method of inoculation first developed by José Flores using the cantharides beetle to raise blisters for smallpox inoculation. 128. Joseph de Medina (1680–1744) graduated from the University of San Carlos in 1712. In 1718, he occupied the chair in medicine at the university (catedrático de Prima de Medicina). He trained five bachilleres of medicine during his career, including Manuel Ávalos y Porras. Ávalos y Porras (1701–1775) was born in Santiago de Guatemala and went on to obtain his doctorate in medicine in 1734 from the same university. Martínez Durán, Las ciencias médicas en Guatemala, 217; Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala, 147, 605. 129. AGCA A1.4.10–271–5909, f. 7. 130. Ibid., f. 7v. I have not been able to locate these separate instructions.

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131. Ibid., f. 7v–8 132. Ibid., f. 7. 133. Robert McCaa, “Spanish and Nahuatl Views on Smallpox and Demographic Catastrophe in Mexico,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25:3 (1995): 421. 134. AGCA A1.4.10–271–5909, f. 9–9v. 135. Ibid., f. 9, 9v 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid., f. 9. 138. Gazeta de México, November 17, 1784, 186. 139. AGCA A1.4.10–271–5909, f. 9v. 140. Ibid., f. 9. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., f. 10v. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. For more on the link between the Esquipulas shrine and the miraculous healing qualities of its dirt as it relates to Mesoamerican medical and ritual practices, see John M. Hunter and Renate de Klein, “Geophagy in Central America,” Geographical Review 74:2 (April 1984): 157–69. 146. AGCA A1.4.10–271–5909, f. 7. 147. Ibid., f. 9v. 148. Ibid., f. 10. 149. Ibid., f. 10; Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 213, cited in Francisco J. Santamaría, Diccionario de Mejicanismos (Mexico, DF: Editorial Porrua, 1992), 987. 150. Ibid., f. 7–8. Paul Farmer notes in Infections and Inequalities similar stereotypes of the Haitian poor as being unable to take their medications adequately, and that provides a justification among some for not treating them. 151. AGCA A1.4.10–271–5909, f. 8. A major portion of this handbook contains attacks on indigenous medical responses to disease. 152. Ibid., f. 7v. 153. AGCA A1.7–271–5901 (1765), f. 1–10v. This document is a visita (inspection) that investigated conditions of the hospital’s kitchen, bakery and food supply, the boticario (pharmacy), its medicinal herbs and medical recipe books, and general conditions of its female, indigenous, and ladino patients. 154. Ibid., f. 10. 155. Ibid., f. 5–5v. 156. Ibid., f. 5v, 7v. 157. Ibid., f. 10. 158. Ibid., f. 7v. 159. Ibid., f. 2–3v. 160. Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 228. 161. “Salud eterna.” AGCA A1.7–271–5901, f. 8. Note also a reference to feeding the sick body in hospital settings with alimento espiritual, “spiritual sustenance” (f. 7v). 162. Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la vacuna,’ ” 10. 163. Rigau-Pérez, “Smallpox Epidemics in Puerto Rico,” 433. 164. This epidemic has been analyzed as a continent-wide phenomenon by Fenn in Pox Americana.

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165. Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la vacuna,’ ” 10. 166. It seems that in Chile, inoculation was introduced much earlier on, when friars began using the procedure during a smallpox epidemic in the 1760s. Adam Warren, personal communication, August 11, 2007. 167. In comparison, inoculation was introduced in Puerto Rico in 1792. See RigauPérez, “Smallpox Epidemics in Puerto Rico,” 433. 168. Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 244; Martínez Durán, Las ciencias médicas en Guatemala, 328–29. 169. Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala, 601, 863. 170. Ávalos y Porras’ official title at the time was Cathedrático de Prima Medicina. AGCA A1–271–5919, f. 1. The typhus cure is found here as well. Note that the disease, despite being labeled “tabardillo,” may not actually have been typhus. It was also labeled “epidemia de la constitución.” 171. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 169. 172. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–31001 (1780), n.p. 173. Ibid. It is unclear just when the main hospital in Nueva Guatemala, Hospital San Juan de Dios, better known as the Hospital Real, was built and completed in the new capital city. J. Aznar López in El Doctor don José de Flores: Una vida al servicio de la ciencia (Guatemala, CA: Editorial Universitaria, 1960), argues that the hospital was completed in 1779, and Flores took charge from 1779 to 1781 (22). Martínez Durán asserts that Flores did not join the hospital staff until 1781 in Las ciencias médicas en Guatemala, 361. 174. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–31001, n.p. 175. Ibid. 176. Ibid. 177. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–30999 (August 23, 1780), n.p. 178. AGCA A1.4–49–241247, méritos y servicios de Doctor Don Toribio de Carbajal (1806), 3. While Carbajal did not include the exact date of his inoculations in Petapa, given the other dated information around which this information is embedded, I judge this to be the 1780 epidemic. 179. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–31004 (September 5, 1780), n.p. 180. Ibid. This stands in contrast to Greg Grandin’s findings that identified discourses of the urban poor as illness vectors during the 1830s cholera epidemic in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. See Grandin’s impor tant work The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 181. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–31004. 182. Ibid. 183. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–30999 (August 23, 1780), n.p. Galera can refer to a hospital ward, though no hospital had yet been established in 1780. It seems that this may have referred to either a temporary hospital, or to a temporary ward set up in the parish church or the monastery of the same name. 184. Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, 5. 185. It is unclear from the surviving sources that I have been able to locate exactly how many people were inoculated. 186. Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, 5. 187. José Flores, Instrucción sobre el modo de practicar la inoculación de las viruelas, y el método para curar esta enfermedad acomodado a la naturaleza y modo de vivir los Indios del reyno de Guatemala (Nueva Guatemala: Ignacio Beteta, 1793), 3.

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188. Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, 5. 189. Ibid., 4. Servants, slaves and children frequently served as medical test subjects in colonial Guatemala. 190. Ibid. 191. Ibid., 5. 192. AGCA A1.4.7–4026–31004. 193. Ibid. 194. AGCA A1–6097–55507, carta de Fray Juan Ramón Solis a Francisco Geraldino (October 1, 1780), f. 36–37.

Chapter 2 1. My research on the cultural and medical history of typhus epidemics and Mesoamerican and colonial responses to the disease in this chapter builds on W. George Lovell’s pioneering historical demography research on epidemic disease in colonial Guatemala, especially found in his monograph Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala. See also W. George Lovell, “Las enfermedades del Viejo Mundo y la mortandad indígena: la viruela y el tabardillo en la Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, Guatemala (1780–1810),” Mesoamérica 16 (1988): 239–85. 2. “Todo esto es un laverinto, un espanto y confusion, que parese huien este curato un Angel exterminador de las vidas,” AGCA A1–194–4967, “Sobre continuacion de fiebres en los pueblos de Soloma, San Mateo, San Miguel Soloma, y Santa Eulalia de la jurisdicion de Totonicapan” (1804), f. 1v. 3. The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), s.v. “Typhus, Epidemic.” 4. For recent research on the existence of lice in the Americas before European colonialism, see Didier Raoult et  al., “Molecular Identification of Lice from PreColumbian Mummies,” The Journal of Infectious Diseases 197:4 (February  15, 2008): 535–43. These authors argue that “because head lice have been recovered from New World mummies with radio carbon dates as old as 10,000 years BP, we know that lice arrived in the New World with the first peoples near the end of the Pleistocene” (537). See also A. Araujo et al., “Ten Thousand Years of Head Lice Infection,” Parasitology Today 16 (2000): 269. It is not known whether these lice carried typhus organisms. David Cook notes evidence for murine typhus—transmitted by fleas, which were in the New World before Columbus. Nobel David Cook, “Sickness, Starvation, and Death in Early Hispaniola,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32:3 (2002): 362. See also Francisco Guerra, “Origen y efectos demográficos del tifo en el México colonial,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 8:3 (1999): 273–319. 5. Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, s.v. “Typhus, Epidemic.” 6. Cook and Lovell, “Unraveling the Web of Disease,” 226. 7. Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala, 168. 8. AGCA A1–194–4967, carta a Prudencio de Cozar de Fray Juan José Juárez, Tzuluma [Soloma] (December 9, 1804), f. 3v. The priest thought that this was likely an undercount. Concepción was one of the first towns to experience a typhus outbreak during this period (1796–97) and actually experienced two outbreaks that winter. Anne

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Cox Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango, Guatemala: The Formation of a Corporate Community” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1980): 65. 9. See for example AGCA A1.24–6091–55306, “Epidemia, Soloma,” carta de Mariano Larrave, Nueva Guatemala (April 20, 1804), f. 14v. 10. AGCA A1–194–4967, carta a Prudencio de Cozar de Fray Juan José Juárez, Tzuluma [Soloma] (December 9, 1804), especially f. 3v. 11. Collins notes that locally the inhabitants of the new intendancy system of Totonicapán continued to refer to its head as alcalde mayor because this jurisdiction used to be known as the corregimiento or alcaldía mayor of Totonicapán and Huehuetenango. Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango,” 260; see also Lovell, Conquest and Survival, 11. 12. AGCA A1–194–4968, f. 1, 21; A1.24–6091–55306, f. 44; A1–194–4969, f. 5–6, 18, 18v; AGCA A1–194–4969, “Metodo curativo observado con buen succeso en la curacion de la epidemia de fiebres petequales que ha padecido el Pueblo de Sta. Eulalia,” f. 29. 13. It was not until 1948 that physicians and scientists found that antibiotics cured typhus. Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease, s.v. “Typhus, Epidemic.” 14. Gage, A New Survey of the West-India’s, 164. 15. “El mal olor en el aliento semejante al cadaverico.” AGCA A1–194–4969, “Memoria de Medicinas para el Pueblo de Santa Eulalia, del partido de Totonicapan” (1804), f. 5. 16. Lawrence Feldman, trans., “Correspondence on the Discovery, Prevention, and Halting of Outbreaks of Typhus, 1797–1798,” Caduceus 7:3 (1991): 23–24. 17. AGCA A3–255–5719, carta de Francisco de Aguirre a la Audiencia, Huehuetenango (March 8, 1797), f. 2. 18. Feldman, “Correspondence on the Discovery, Prevention, and Halting of Outbreaks of Typhus,” 23. Aguirre, the author of this letter, here is referring to the towns of Todos Santos, Concepción, Santiago Petatán, San Juan Ixcoy, Santa Eulalia, and Nebaj. 19. AGCA A3–255–5719, f. 1v–4. The sheep were an impor tant source of food and wool for the town. 20. Ibid., f. 1v. For a description of a jaguar eating the bodies of the epidemic dead in San Juan Ixcoy, see AGCA A1–194–4967, carta de Faustino Argueta a la Presidente de la Audiencia, Gueguetenango (January 15, 1805), f. 12v. 21. For a description of a flock of twenty-five sheep that died from lack of care after their owner, an Indian political official, sickened and died from typhus in Concepción in the fall of 1797, see AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco Xavier Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 24, 1797), f. 30. Foraging animals also wandered through in the capital during epidemics, where they also reportedly dug up and ate the epidemic dead. See AGCA A1–24–6101–55668 (1797), f. 12. 22. Quoted in Lovell, Conquest and Survival, 169. 23. Gage, A New Survey of the West-India’s, 164; AGCA A1–24–6101–55668, f. 11v; Lovell, Conquest and Survival, 170–71. 24. For medieval illness theories, see J. N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). Thanks to Roger Gathman for this reference. 25. The Popul Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

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26. Orellana, Indian Medicine of Highland Guatemala, 148. See also Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives. For an interest ing study on the importance of fragrant smells in elite Classic Era Maya culture, see the section “Classic Maya Smell” in Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 141–53. 27. Cortés y Larraz frequently notes this practice. See for example his description of indigenous burial rituals used in the towns of Comalapam parish. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:89. For descriptions of the use of sahumerios and copales for burials in the towns of San Cristobal Totonicapán, San Andrés Secul, and Olintepeque, 2:105. I do not have any information that provides detail on differences in the use of copal for funerals for the typhus dead as opposed to funerals for those who died of smallpox or measles. 28. Ibid., 105. 29. AGCA A1–6101–55666, José Flores, “Ynstruccion para curar los tabardillos que se padecen el el Pueblo de Jacaltenango y otros de la Alcaldia Mayor de Totonicapán” (November 19, 1796), f. 9v. 30. AGCA A1–194–4969, carta de Fray Juan José Juárez a la Audiencia, Santa Eulalia (January 10, 180[?]), f. 16v–17. For Seville, see Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook, The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth- Century Seville (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). 31. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstruccion para curar los tabardillos,” f. 10–10v. 32. Cocolmeca is also called cocomecatl, palo de la vida, or palo de china. Edward Polanco (personal communication, October 26, 2012) suggests that this plant is cocomecaxihuitl in Nahuatl, where xihuitl refers to fire, year, plant, yerba, herb, or grass, roughly translating into “afflicted-rope-herb” or “ bitter-rope-herb.” 33. Ximénez, Historia natural, 246, 248. Ximénez further noted that he continued to experiment with the bark to see “if in some way, as they say, that it brings back the dead from their graves” (247). 34. Ximénez, Historia natural, 247. Olga Ruiz, an herbalist in Imuris, Sonora,  judges this plant to be Phaseolus metcalfei, a root used locally for infertility, irregular menstruation, and inflammation of the reproductive organs. Personal communication, October 2012. Thanks to Rebecca Masten Crocker for facilitating this communication. 35. Gazeta de México, February 22, 1785, 241. The Gazeta also reported that flecha or arbol de la Margarita, used to treat typhus, reportedly cured rabies and smallpox as well. 36. AGI, Indiferente General 1550, “Relación de las raices y yervas medicinales,” n.p. 37. AGCA A1–6088–55135, “En obedecimiento y cumplimiento de despacho y supremas ordenas y con arreglo a instruccion que ellas se cita y he hallado en este archivo, yo Dn. Francisco Geraldino alc. mayor por S.M. y Teniente de Capitan Gral. de esta Prov.s de Guegue[tenango] y Toto[nicapam] formó un cajón con las producciones medicinales,” Gueguetenango (February 2, 1784), f. 35–39. 38. Ibid., f. 35v. 39. AGCA A1–6088–55135, “No pueden usar de ella las preñadas por ser abortibo mui biolento,” f. 36. For more on abortifacient knowledge in the Atlantic world, see

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the work of Londa Schiebinger, especially Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 40. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstruccion para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9v. 41. Fray Francisco Montero de Miranda, “Descripción de la provincia de Verapaz (ca. 1574)” Anales de la Sociedad de Geografia e Historia de Guatemala 27 (1954): 354. 42. Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, Description of the Indies (c. 1620), translated by Charles Upson Clark (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 210. 43. “Bubas.” Ximénez, Historia Natural, 167. 44. Ibid., 168. 45. Today this town is known as San Lorenzo El Tejar, located in the municipality of Pastores in the Department of Sacatepéquez. Ximénez, Historia Natural, 169. 46. Vázquez de Espinosa, Description of the Indies, 220. 47. Domingo Juarros, Compendio de la Historia de la Ciudad de Guatemala (Guatemala, CA: Imprenta de la Luna, 1857), 1:48. 48. AGCA A1–6088–55135 (1783), n.p. 49. Ibid. 50. Gazeta de Guatemala, September 16, 1779, 103. 51. Ximénez, Historia natural, 167. 52. Ibid., 167. 53. Alain Ichon, “A Late Postclassic Sweat house in the Highlands of Guatemala,” American Antiquity 42:2 (April 1977): 203–9. 54. Nicholas J. Saunders, “A Dark Light: Reflections on Obsidian in Mesoamerica,” World Archaeology 33:2 (October 2001): 229. 55. For Indigenous use of temascal treatments in cases of epidemic disease, see A1–192–3911, f. 2 (typhus); AGCA A1–6097–55507, f. 17–17v (smallpox); Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:61 (measles); and AGCA A1.24–6091–55306, “Epidemia de Sarampion en Soloma” (May 3, 1804), f. 6 (measles). 56. “The temascal is one of the principal causes of the spread of the [typhus] fever, [with] fatal consequences among the Indians.” AGCA A1–194–4969, “Metodo curativo,” f. 29v. 57. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstrucción para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9–9v. 58. AGCA A1–194–4969, carta a alcalde mayor Prudencio de Cozar de Mariano Francisco Zenteno, Quetsaltenango (August 6, 1804), f. 49v. Zentano was a pharmacist, sent to Santa Eulalia and San Juan Ixcoy to work in the afflicted area during the later stages of the typhus epidemic, after licensed medical doctor Mariano Larrave had been unable to stop it and left (Ibid.). 59. AGCA A1.24–6091–55306, “Epidemia, Soloma,” carta de Mariano Larrave, Nueva Guatemala (April 20, 1804). For more disciplining language linked with epidemic hospitals, see f. 14v., which describes that the purpose of the epidemic hospital was to “to correct this disorder.” See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1973), for a key work on hospitals as sites of modern disciplining. It is impor tant to keep in mind that “premodern” colonial states also played a role in establishing hospitals as disciplining institutions. 60. AGCA A1–194–4969, carta de Mariano Larrave al Protomédico Dr. D. Jose Antonio Cordova, Santa Eulalia (January 2, 1804), f. 5v.

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61. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstrucción para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9v. 62. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstrucción para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9v. 63. “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos en la jurisdicción de Sololá, 1819,” Boletín del Archivo Arquidiocesano: “Francisco de Paula García Peláez” 1:3 (July 1989): 124. Chonay is described as “adivino y curandero,” a divinerhealer. He is also described in the sources as an “indio forastero”: an outsider and perhaps an itinerant healer. 64. “Algunos sudores.” The priest may have sanctioned temascal use here. 65. The geographic scope of their reputations and client base is one of the significant aspects about this par ticular healer and others caught up with him in the anticurandero investigations in the Maya towns around Lake Atitlán at this time. 66. In Western medical traditions, one form of medicinal bloodletting was wet cupping that “used scarifiers with several small blades. These instruments first produced multiple small incisions followed by vacuum cup application to remove blood.” Ralph G. DePalma, Virginia W. Hayes, and Leo R. Zachariski, “Bloodletting: Past and Present,” Journal of the American College of Surgery 205:1 (July 2007): 136. In dry cupping, “the cups were first heated and then rapidly applied to the skin. Later, a vacuum was applied to cups using attached syringes. Because cups were applied without incision, their vacuum effects caused blistering (dry cupping) and served as a counterirritant.” John S. Haller Jr., “The Glass Leech: Wet and Dry Cupping Practices in the Nineteenth Century,” New York State Journal of Medicine 73:4 (1973): 583–92. 67. All the material from this paragraph comes from “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos,” 125. This conflict entered the historical record because Rueche refused to participate in the divination with the crystals, and because Rueche’s husband’s parents “threw the daughter[-in-law] out of the house” after her husband’s death and took their infant grandchild (criatura del pecho) “because of the love they [the grandparents] naturally have for the child” (125). 68. Locally, the inhabitants of the new intendancy system of Totonicapán continued to refer to its head as “alcalde mayor” because this jurisdiction used to be known as the corregimiento or alcaldía mayor of Totonicapán and Huehuetenango. Aguirre was the first alcalde mayor of Totonicapán under the new intendancy system of Bourbon reforms. See Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango,” 164–65, 260; Lovell, Conquest and Survival, 11. 69. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstruccion para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9–10v. 70. AGCA A1–271–5919, Ávalos, “Breve methodo de curar la enfermedad epidemica de la constitucion,” f. 1v–2. 71. To name just a few besides the 1796 Flores guide, see AGCA A1–271–5919, f. 5–6v; and AGCA A1–194–4969, “Metodo curativo,” f. 29. 72. AGCA A1–6101–55666, auto de la Real Audiencia, (October 25, 1797, f. 18; Francisco de Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 2, 1797), f. 18v; carta de Francisco de Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 4, 1797), f. 19. 73. AGCA A1.24–6101–55668, f. 38. 74. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco Xavier Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 28, 1796), f. 13v.

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75. AGCA A1–194–4969, “Memoria de medicinas para el Pueblo de Santa Eulalia” (1804), f. 4. 76. AGCA A1–194–4969, carta de Mariano de Larrave al Protomédico José Antonio Córdova, Santa Eulalia (January 2, 1804), f. 5, “sahumerio con pólvoro de su equipage.” AGCA A1–194–4969, carta de Prudencio de Cozar al Presidente Antonio González, Totonicapán (January 6, 1804), then forwarded to the Protomedicato, f. 1. Prudencio de Cozar held the post of alcalde mayor of Totonicapán from September 30, 1802, to November 14, 1810. 77. AGCA A1–194–4969, “Los alcaldes Españoles y Ladinos del pueblo de Santa Ana Malacatán” [Certification of Fumigation], Lacal (December 21, 1803), f. 3. 78. The cost was listed as 72 pesos, 4 reales. AGCA A1–6101–55666, “Lista del del cajón de bótica,” f. 21. 79. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 14, 1797), f. 22v. Carranza, as the lead medical doctor for the initial provincial response, earned a salary of six pesos per day. His salary was set by the Audiencia via the Real Auto (January 14, 1797). All the information on the medical personnel and their salaries for this expedition described in this section are found in AGCA A1–6101– 55666, carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (March 12, 1798), f. 32v–33. 80. The medicinal bleeder’s salary of four pesos daily was also set via the same Real Auto. 81. This pattern was repeated across typhus-afflicted towns. See for example AGCA, A1–194–4969, carta de Prudencio de Cozar al Presidente of Audiencia Antonio González, Totonicapán (January 6, 1804), f. 1–2. This information was then forwarded to the Protomedicato. 82. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco de Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 4, 1797), f. 21–22v; carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (March 12, 1798), f. 32v–33. 83. Ibid., carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 4, 1797), f. 19v, 21. 84. Feldman, “Correspondence on the Discovery, Prevention, and Halting of Outbreaks of Typhus,” 24. 85. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Sebastián Ruiz a Francisco de Aguirre, Momostenango (November [?], 1797), f. 20v. He called the Audiencia “el país de Guatemala.” 86. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 6, 1797), f. 20–21. Arriola’s title is padre cura coadjutor. 87. This town is not named. 88. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco de Aguirre to the Audiencia (n.d.), f. 21v. Given placement in the file, the date of the letter is ca. November 14, 1797. 89. Feldman, “Correspondence on the Discovery,” 23. 90. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstrucción para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9 and AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de José Flores, Protomédico y médico honrario de su Magestad” (November 19, 1796), f. 12. 91. AGCA A1–6101–55666, Flores, “Ynstrucción para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9. Note that “Norte” is capitalized in the source. 92. AGCA A1.24–6091–55306, “Epidemia, Soloma,” carta de Mariano Larrave, Nueva Guatemala (April 20, 1804), f. 14v. 93. “Todo el pueblo está enmontado.” AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco de Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 21, 1797), f. 28.

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94. My exploration of los montes here was inspired by conversations with Liz Oglesby about the ways that this served as a place of refuge for the Ixil and other Maya ethnic groups from the Guatemalan military and as a space of resistance for armed revolutionaries during La Violencia, Guatemala’s recent era of military dictatorships. This exploration is also inspired by the work of Lauren Derby who uses the concept of el monte as a space of ritual activity and escaped slave communities in eighteenthcentury Hispaniola (today the Dominican Republic and Haiti) that continues as a space of resistance to this day. As Derby puts it, “tales of the enchantment of el monte have remained constant, from the eighteenth- century negro incognito, who was said to be able to metamorphose, to Trujillo’s enemy Enrique Blanco, who took refuge in the mountains and could appear as an animal, to the ciguapa, a furry feminine creature, spied in thickets and mountain passes, which walks with feet askew and whose kidnapping antics form a genre of Dominican captivity tale.” Lauren Derby, “Trujillo, the Goat: Of Beasts, Men, and Politics in the Dominican Republic,” in Few and Tortorici, eds., Centering Animals in Latin American History, 314. 95. For an analy sis of the extant colonial sources describing the Kaqchikel uprisings, see W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz, Strange Lands and Different Peoples: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 62–74. 96. Robert M. Hill, Los kaqchikeles de la época colonial: Adaptaciones de los mayas del altiplano al gobierno español, 1600–1700 (South Woodstock, VT: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 2011), 150. 97. Ibid. This process of Maya flight from colonial rule into the frontier or jungle areas of Yucatán and the Petén suggests that escape to los montes was part of a broader historical and geographical affiliation in Mesoamerica throughout the colonial period. For the Petén and the Yucatán, see Grant D. Jones, Maya Resistance to Spanish Rule: Time and History on a Colonial Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); and Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 98. “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos,” 121–32. 99. The word “sahorin” is of Arabic origin, here used to describe Maya ritual specialists. According to Daniel Brinton, in the nineteenth century, Mayas used the title sahorin to describe shape-shifter diviners who could, among other things, make themselves invisible to “walk unseen among their enemies” or could “in a moment transport themselves to distant places” and report back about what they saw. Daniel G. Brinton, “Nagualism: A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 33:144 (February 14, 1894): 34. Residing in San Pablo La Laguna, Pérez had a regional reputation as successful healer, attracting patients from all over who knew of his reputation por pública voz y fama (through local and regional social networks). “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos,” 125, 130. 100. “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos,” 127. 101. “Haciendo oraciones.” Ibid., 127. 102. Ibid., 128. This is according to thirty-five year old Juan Diego Xingo, a former escribano de cabildo originally from Panajachel but since his marriage to Ventura Queche had resided in Atitlán. Santiago Ramírez’s alias was Jacobo Quil. 103. Ibid., 128–29.

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104. Castilian lights refer to candles. Ibid., 128–29. Note the reference and link to other highland towns. 105. Doris Heyden argues Mesoamerican cultures considered certain springs, caves, and hills “animated” (animados), and ritual specialists made invocations and offerings to them. Doris Heyden, “La muerte del Tlatoani: Costumbres funerarías en el México antiguo,” Estudios de cultura Nahuatl 27 (1997): 89. See also Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueve España e islas de la Tierra Firme (Mexico, DF: Editorial Porrúa, 1967), 1:282. 106. The curandero adivinos received payments of four or five pesos for their ser vices. 107. The clothing items are referred to as “vestidos antiguos” (ancient clothing). It is not clear from the documents what saint this refers to. 108. “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos,” 127. In the source, colonial authorities referred to Xingo as a “rational and hispanicized Indian” (un indio racional y muy castellano) educated by the Franciscan priest Fray Antonio Martínez. 109. Sources note that many highland communities had milpas not only near their towns but also in the warm coastal lowlands. See for example AGCA A1–494–4969, carta de Mariano de Larrave al Presidente Don Antonio González, Santa Eulalia (January 13, 1804), f. 14. 110. Quoted in Lovell, Conquest and Survival, 166. 111. For use of the verb “reducir” to refer to gathering the sick and placing them in hospitals for monitoring, see AGCA A1.24–6091–55306, carta de Prudencio de Cozar al Presidente, Totonicapán (January 18, 1804), f. 12, “to reduce all the sick that can be to a hospital, trying in this way to see if some can heal.” 112. AGCA A1–194–4969, “Metodo curativo,” f. 29v. 113. The parish towns are Petatán, San Antonio Huista, San Andrés, San Marcos, and Jacaltenango. 114. AGCA A1–6101–55666, carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 21, 1797), f. 28. 115. AGCA A1–194–4969, carta de Mariano de Larrave al Presidente de la Audiencia, Santa Eulalia (January 13, 1804), f. 18–18v. 116. “Un ladino y de un yndio racional Mateo [Virbes].” Ibid. 117. AGCA A1–194–4969, “Informe al Real Protomedicato” (April  20, 1804), f. 21. 118. AGCA A1–194–4967, carta a Prudencio de Cozar de Fray Juan José Juárez, Tzuluma [Soloma] (December 9, 1804), f. 2v. 119. Priests working in the region had known of the shrine’s existence for some forty years—since at least the early 1770s—but had not taken any steps against its use until the typhus epidemic. Most of the detailed information on the Concepción adoratorio comes from AGCA A1.24–6101–55668 (1797), f. 13–17v; for reference to the fact that the adoratorio had been known about and used for at least forty years, see f. 13. See also Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango,” 164–65, 260. 120. AGCA A1.24–6101–55668, f. 13. 121. Ibid. Some Mesoamerican ritual specialists specialized in weather-working; that is the implication in the sources, or that some other kind of supernatural intervention prevented the priest from travelling to the adoratorio.

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122. Ibid. Apparently the parish priest did not speak Jakaltek, the Maya language spoken in the communities to which he ministered. 123. Ibid., f. 13–13v. 124. Ibid., f. 13v. 125. “Maestro de coro.” Ibid., f. 3v. 126. “Serian azotados con el mayor rigor.” Ibid., f. 14. 127. Ibid., f. 14v. 128. Ibid., f. 15v. The adoratorio, named in the sources as the “Temple of Cuman and Calmi,” honored the burial site of Jichmam and his wife Culmi, the ancestral father and mother of the Jakatltek lineage, and remains active today. Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango,” 261. 129. Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango,” 261. 130. AGCA A1.24–6101–55668, f. 17v. 131. Ibid., f. 16–17. For more on turkeys as a substitute for human sacrifice, see León García Garza, “The Year the People Turned into Cattle: The End of the World in New Spain, 1558,” in Few and Tortorici, eds., Centering Animals in Latin American History, 49. 132. AGCA A1–6101–55666, report from Francisco Aguirre to the Audiencia (November 23, 1797), f. 29v. 133. Guatemala’s Archbishop at this time was Juan Félix Villegas. Ibid., carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia (November 22, 1797), f. 28. 134. The date of this previous census is not noted in the sources. Ibid., f. 28v. 135. Ibid., f. 28. 136. Ibid., f. 28v. 137. AGCA A1–2804–24640, cover sheet. I presented preliminary research on Santa Eulalia’s sacred cave and its map at the 2011 annual meetings of the American Society for Ethnohistory in Pasadena, California, where I benefitted from helpful comments from Alex Hidalgo, John López, Dana Liebsohn, and Barbara Mundy. I presented a revised version at the “The Paths of Medical Un/orthodoxy: Colonial Latin America and its World,” a symposium held at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, in November 2013. I am grateful especially to Fiona Clark and Ryan Kashanipour for their helpful comments. 138. The corazón del maíz referred to here was never described, nor did other documents associated with the cave mention it again. Perhaps this is related to, or a version of, an agricultural ritual that Oliver La Farge identified during his earlytwentieth- century ethnographic fieldwork as the “Spirit of the Corn,” a ceremony that marked Santa Eulalia’s planting season. La Farge provides no further details. See his Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatán Town (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). 139. AGCA A1–2804–24640, f. 1–1v. 140. Ibid., f. 1. 141. Ibid., f. 1v. 142. “Idolatrías y agüeros.” Ibid., f.1. 143. Ibid., f. 1v. 144. AGCA A1.24–6101–55668, f. 9; Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Flórida, 3:26; Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:114, 130. 145. For more on this process, see Adriaan C. van Oss, Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524–1821 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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146. Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango,”164–165, 260. 147. Ibid.,163. 148. A1–2804–24640, f. 2v. 149. The schoolteacher is not named. A1–2804–24640, f. 2. 150. The sources did not record the map’s painter, but perhaps one or both of these two men produced it to provide material evidence of Maya ritual practices and assist in the prosecution the Q’anjob’al ritual specialists who performed ceremonies there. 151. Contemporary Maya peoples continue to conduct ritual ceremonies in caves to this day for rain, good harvests, and to ensure community well-being. James E. Brady, “Offerings to the Rain Gods: The Archaeology of Maya Caves,” in Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea, edited by Daniel Finamore and Stephen D. Houston, 220– 22 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 152. Brady, “Offerings to the Rain Gods,” 221; Evon Z. Vogt and David Stuart, “Some Notes on Ritual Caves among the Ancient and Modern Maya,” in In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use, edited by James E. Brady and Keith M. Prufer, 155–85 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 156; Manuel Aguilar et al., “Constructing Mythic Space: The Significance of a Chicomotztoc Complex at Acatzingo Viejo,” in Brady and Prufer, eds., In the Maw of the Earth Monster, 84– 85. I note that significant research has been conducted on ancient and modern ritual cave use among the Maya, but not, however, for the colonial period. 153. Vogt and Stuart, “Some Notes on Ritual Caves,” 156. 154. Brady, “Offerings to the Rain Gods,” 221. 155. Karl A. Taube, “The Teotihuacán Cave of Origin: The Iconography and Architecture of Emergence My thology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 12 (Autumn 1986): 51–82. 156. Manuel Aguilar et al., “Constructing Mythic Space,” 85. I thank Edward Polanco for this reference to the metaphor of the cave as generative womb. 157. See also Doris Heyden, “Los ritos de paso en las cuevas,” Boletín, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), México (September 1969): 17–18. The Santa Eulalia cave persists as an active ritual location for the Q’anjob’al Maya in northern Huehuetenango to the present day. For more on this cave from the perspective of early-twentieth- century ethnographic fieldwork, see LaFarge, Santa Eulalia. For archaeological research on Santa Eulalia’s cave today, see Sergio Garza’s work, especially “Género, complementaridad y separación en rituales Mayas en Santa Eulalia, Guatemala,” in XX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, edited by J. P. Laporte et al., 1171–78 (Guatemala, CA: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, 2006); and in the same volume, Sergio Garza, James E. Brady and Emilio Merino, “Una perspectiva etnoarqueológica sobre la utilización del espacio en cuevas en Santa Eulalia, Huehuetenango,” 1213–18. 158. Numerous other examples exist in New Spain and elsewhere of Christian sacred spaces and buildings constructed on top of sacred Indigenous sites. This was a way to visibly signal Christianity’s dominance over Mesoamerican religious practices, part of the historical processes of conquest and colonialism. It was also a way to ensure that residents would continue to consider the site ritually impor tant as they had in the past, such as the healing shrine of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas in Guatemala. Stephen F. de Borhegyi, “The Cult of Our Lord of Esquipulas in Middle America and New Mexico,” El Palacio 61 (1954): 387–401.

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159. AGCA A1–2804–24640, f. 1. 160. La Farge, Santa Eulalia, 83. 161. I retain the spellings of these locations as La Farge presents them in his work. La Farge, Santa Eulalia, 113. La Farge later describes the site this way: “The cave is the home of Hitc Mame and Tcutc Icnam. Its entrance is in the steep cliffs on the northern edge of the village, not far from the Calvario. The three crosses of yitc kanan on the top of the cliff beside the road to the Calvario correspond with this cave as well as with the hill . . . I was warned very emphatically and many times not to approach it. Many of these warnings were given out of a perfectly clear sky, when I had not brought up the subject in any way.” La Farge, Santa Eulalia, 127. 162. Garza et al., “Una perspectiva etnoarqueológica sobre la utilización del espacio en cuevas,” 1213. 163. Thanks to Ryan Kashanipour for pointing this out. 164. A1–2804–24640, f. 3. 165. Ibid. Ocote was also used as fuel and as the basis for a black ink used in indigenous writing and mapmaking. For more on the use of ocote as the basis for ink on Indigenous maps, see Alex Hidalgo, “The Indian Map Trade in Colonial Oaxaca” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2012). 166. Ximénez, Historia natural, 246. 167. La Farge, Santa Eulalia, 73. 168. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:119. 169. These ritual details are found in Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:119–20. 170. AGCA A1–2804–24640, f. 8. Fray Juárez goes on to write, ““I have seen this with my own eyes . . . , even in the home of a Maestro de Coro who detests these simplicities.” 171. AGCA A1–2804–24640, f. 8–8v. 172. The sources provide only a few intriguing details about them, and most of that information comes from Juárez. I use here a generic term “ritual specialists” because while other research on Maya ritual specialists in this region identify ritual office holders as alcaldes rezadores, the sources that I have identified do not use this term. See Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango”; and Garza, “Género, complementariedad y separación en rituales Mayas en Santa Eulalia.” 173. “Algun Maestro de Divinación,” AGCA A1–2804–24640, f. 8. 174. Ibid., f. 12–13. 175. Ibid. f. 12, 13. 176. Ibid. f. 3. 177. James E. Brady and Pierre R. Colas, “Nikte’ Mo’ Scattered Fire in the Cave of K’ab Chante,’ in Stone Houses and Earth Lords: Maya Religion in the Cave Context, edited by Keith M. Prufer and James E. Brady, 149–66 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), 152. 178. AGCA A1–2804–24640, f. 3v. 179. AGCA A1–6104–55793, carta de Francisco Aguirre, Totonicapán (August 6, 1801), f. 1, 2. See also AGCA A1–6104–55793, Auto de la Real Audiencia, Nueva Guatemala (January  18, 1802), f. 3, transcribed by Hector Concoha Chet, accessed March 7, 2014, http://www.afehc-historia- centroamericana.org. 180. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Fray Francisco Abello a Francisco Aguirre, San Juan Cotzal (December 25, 1797), f. 1–1v, 3–3v.

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181. Ibid., carta al oidor fiscal de Francisco Aguirre, Totonicapán (January 7, 1798), f. 9. 182. As the outbreak appeared to be waning, Abella also noted that plans had been made for postepidemic census and an update of the libro de tributos, the town’s tribute rolls. Ibid., carta de Fray Francisco Abello a Francisco Aguirre San Juan Cotzal (December 25, 1797), f. 1v. 183. Ibid., f. 2. When the news arrived that the alcalde de milpas elect of Nebaj died a few days earlier, the priest began to negotiate with the remaining alcaldes to name another to take his place. 184. Ibid., carta de Fray Francisco Abello a Francisco Aguirre, Nebaj (January 2, 1798), f. 4–7v. 185. Alvis Dunn has written an impor tant article on this rebellion, where he emphasized the change in the town’s burial sites to the Campo Santo and the gendered role of women as defenders of local cultural practices as key aspects of death and mourning. Alvis E. Dunn, “A Cry at Daybreak: Death, Disease, and Defense of Community in a Highland Ixil-Mayan Village,” Ethnohistory 42:4 (Fall 1995): 595–606. I wish to build on Dunn’s research in two ways: to add more details to the medical issues that formed part of this conflict by adding additional sources and details on the Nebaj uprising, and to place the uprising in a broader context of cases of indigenous resistance to colonial medical campaigns against typhus in the late 1790s and early 1800s. 186. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Fray Francisco Abello a Francisco Aguirre, Nebaj (January 2, 1798), f. 4. 187. Ibid., f. 4v. 188. “Se cree . . . que por aqui anda un gran duende que [i] . . . los animos como lo declare.” Ibid., n.p. 189. “Duende,” Diccionario de Autoridades, 1732, 1780, and 1791 editions, accessed June 5, 2013, http:// buscon.rae.es/ntlle. “Anda como un duende” can also be used to describe a person or being that always hides or lurks alone or in the corners or empty spaces of homes, and so behaves similarly to a duende. 190. Alba Miriam Paz González Campo, “Delitos contra la flora y fauna, especies protegidas en el Cerro Alux, del municipio de Mixco, Guatemala,” (master’s thesis, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 2006), 3. 191. González Campo, “Delitos contra la flora y fauna,” 3. 192. Celso Lara Figueroa, Cultura espiritual en el Cerro Alux, 4, cited in González Campo, “Delitos contra la flora y fauna,” 3. 193. Dunn, in “A Cry at Daybreak,” focuses on this impor tant issue of burial as a central conflict leading to the uprising. 194. The information noted in this paragraph is located in AGCA A1.21.8–191– 3909, carta de Fray Francisco Abello a Francisco Aguirre, Nebaj (January 2, 1798), f. 5. 195. Ibid., f. 5v. 196. Ibid., f. 5v. The spokeswoman is not named. 197. Ibid., f. 5v, 6v. 198. Ibid., f. 6v. 199. Ibid. 200. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre a Ygnacio Guerra, Secretario de Cámara, Totonicapán (January 18, 1798), f. 15.

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201. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Fray Francisco Abella a Francisco Aguirre, Nebaj (January 2, 1798), f. 6v–7, 7v. 202. Ibid., f. 7. 203. “Autos sobre averiguar las actividades de los curanderos adivinos,” 126–27. Indigenous sacristanes had apparently done the spying in this case, including the sacristán mayor Pablo Tziquin. 204. Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango, Guatemala,” 165, 259. 205. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta a Francisco Aguirre de Vicente Carranza, Huehuetenango (January 5, 1797 [sic; should be 1798]), f. 3v. Dunn in “A Cry at Daybreak” also mentioned the presence of the barber Diego Alvarado as part of the medical campaign, but he was not mentioned in the sources I consulted on these events. 206. Ibid. For evidence about the priest’s thoughts that Nebaj’s Indian alcaldes and principales played central roles in the rebellion, see AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia, Totonicapán (January 18,1798), f. 23. 207. Carranza used the phrase “hacer el tumulto” to refer to the incident. He did not, however, identify where these conflicts took place, apparently assuming that Aguirre would be familiar with the events. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Vicente Carranza a Francisco Aguirre, Huehuetanango (January 5, 1797 [sic; should be 1798]), f. 3. 208. Ibid., f. 3. In a response sent a few days later, Audiencia authorities agreed that Carranza should be given assistance to ensure his safety while he worked in infected pueblos, probably in the form of soldiers, the presence of the alcalde mayor, and other support. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta al Real Palacio Asesor de [?] Collado, Nueva Guatemala (January 12, 1798), f. 11v. 209. The armed men are described as milicianos. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre al Oidor Fiscal, Totonicapán (January 7, 1798), 8–10v. 210. Aguirre described the disorder as haberse sublevado. 211. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre al Oidor Fiscal, Totonicapán (January 7, 1798), 8–10v. 212. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta al Real Palacio Asesor de [?] Collado, Nueva Guatemala (January 12, 1798), f. 11–11v. Collado notes that this same type of harsh response worked well in response to the 1786 Indian rebellion in the town of Salama in the Province of Verapaz. 213. Ibid., f. 11v. 214. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre al Oidor Fiscal Totonicapán (January 7, 1798), 10–10v. I have not been able to locate the letter that contains this list of participants. Additionally Aguirre notes earlier rebellions in Nebaj, but provides no further details. 215. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Carlos José Yndiz a Ygnacio Guerra, Secretario de Cámara, Totonicapán (January 18, 1798), f. 15. 216. Ibid. 217. Ibid., f. 16. 218. Ibid., f. 17; AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, “Mandamiento a los alcaldes de Santa María Nebaj de Francisco Aguirre,” Totonicapán (January 16, 1798), f. 21. 219. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre a Prudencio de Cozar, Quetzaltenango (January16, 1798), f. 18–19. Aguirre further corresponded with Quetzaltenango’s factor de tabacos, Manuel Ygnacio Letona, who confirmed that they had no gunpowder supplies in the partido and suggested that Aguirre contact the gremio

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de coheteros, the guild that controlled the Audiencia’s gunpowder monopoly from the capital Nueva Guatemala. He doubted, however, that they would be able to provide it because what was available was being sent to Granada [Nicaragua] for use by Brigadier Don Cayetano Anonsoategui. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Manuel Ygnacio Letona a Francisco Aguirre, Quetzaltenango (January 16, 1798), f. 20–20v. 220. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta de Francisco Aguirre a la Audiencia, Totonicapán (January 18, 1798), f. 22. 221. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta a la Audiencia de Francisco Aguirre, Totonicapán (January 18, 1798), f. 22–23. 222. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta a Francisco Aguirre del Presidente de la Audiencia José Domas y Valle, Nueva Guatemala (January 23, 1798), f. 24. 223. AGCA A1.21.8–191–3909, carta a la Audiencia de Francisco Aguirre, Totonicapán (October 12, 1798), f. 27. The women were not named in the sources.

Chapter 3 1. AGCA A2.2–185–3699, f. 1–4. 2. Ibid., f. 1, f. 2. 3. Ibid., f. 1–2. 4. Ibid., f. 3v-4. Zuñiga’s title is listed as práctico en cirujía. 5. Ibid., f. 4. 6. Gazeta de Guatemala, October 1, 1804, 453–54. Chatá’s postmortem cesarean is one of four described that occurred in 1799 and 1800 in this area. 7. For more on the Itzá Maya empire and the Petén region in the colonial period, see Grant D. Jones’s pioneering work The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 8. Gazeta de Guatemala, October 1, 1804, 453–54. The Indian who performed the cesarean was described as “el barbero que era indio.” No information was provided on how far along Chatá was in her pregnancy. 9. I am grateful to Lynn Morgan for her comments on an early version of this chapter draft. Note that I am not equating the creation of the fetus as a colonial subject, explored in this chapter, with contemporary discourses of fetal personhood that characterize current academic research on abortion politics. This research, however, could potentially help to create a broader historical context for those debates. See “The Fetal Imperative,” Morgan’s joint introduction with Meredith W. Michaels to their edited volume Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 1–10. In that same volume, see Valerie Hartouni, “Epilogue: Reflections on Abortion Politics and the Practices Called Person,” 296–304. See also Morgan’s Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 10. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 313. 11. Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana, en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y calidad, con las phrases o modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes, y otras cosas convenientes al uso de la lengua [ . . . ].

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Compuesto por la Real Academia Española. Tomo tercero. Que contiene las letras D.E.F. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia Española por la viuda de Francisco del Hierro, 1732), 741. Note that the 1732, 1780, 1783, 1791, 1803, 1817, and 1822 editions all provide the same definition. 12. Ibid. Note that the 1783, 1791, and  1803 editions all provide the same definition. 13. AGCA, A1.22–1509-x, “Don José Estachería . . . Gobernador y Capitán General de este Reyno de Guatemala . . . se establesca en este Reyno la operación Cesárea” (1791). The original auto was passed on October 27, 1785, and was published in Nueva Guatemala November 18, 1785. This is a copy, recirculated on orders of Estachería, on May 24, 1791. Estachería was president of the Audiencia of Guatemala from 1783 to 1789. Born in Spain, he arrived in the Audiencia in 1777 as battalion commander. From 1781 to 1783 he acted as governor of Nicaragua, and then was named president of the Audiencia. As president, he implemented the Intendancy System, part of the Bourbon Reforms enacted in Spain’s colonial dominions. Diccionario Histórico Biográfico de Guatemala, 386. President Estachería’s 1785 order mandating cesareans, reconfirmed in 1791, notes the significant role of surgeon Toribio de Carbajal, who had worked in the Yucatán in what is now Mexico before migrating to the Audiencia of Guatemala to take up a position in the capital as a surgeon. See AGCA A1.22–2588– 21061, f. 16v. Carbajal himself also highlights his role in the promotion of cesareans in Guatemala in his Méritos y Servicios, when he applied for a government pension on the basis of his years of ser vice as medical doctor in Guatemala. See AGCA A1.4–49– 241247. According to J. Augusto González, Carbajal discussed the cesarean procedure with an unnamed Audiencia fiscal (Audiencia political official), who then brought it to Estachería’s attention. See González’s “Recopilación de hechos históricos sobre ginecología y obstétrica en Guatemala,” Revista de la federación centroamericana de sociedades de obstétrica y ginecologia 9:4 (1969): 31. 14. Francos y Monroy’s edict is published in P. Fr. Pedro Mariano Iturbide, Breve y diminuto compendio de la obligación que hay de bautizar los fetos, sacado de las obras que dieron a luz D. Francisco Cangiamila, Canónigo Magistral de Palermo en su Embriologia Sagrada, y el Rmo. P. M. D. Antonio Joseph Rodríguez, Monge Cirterciense en su Nuevo Aspecto de Theologia Médico Moral, y ambos derechos, o paradoxas PhysicoTheologico-Legales (Nueva Guatemala: Oficina de D. Ignacio Beteta, 1788), 38. This work is located in the Museo del Libro, Antigua, Guatemala. This is the only extant copy that I have been able to locate. I am very grateful to Matthew Furlong for locating it in the Museo, and to Director Profesora Marta Julia González de Domínguez and Assistant Director Lic. Luz Midilia Marroquín for providing me with a photocopy of it. For a comparative postmortem cesarean guide in Peru during the 1780s, see Francisco González Laguna, El zelo sacerdotal para los niños no-nacidos (Lima: Imprenta de los Niños Expósitos, 1781). 15. For a copy of the real cédula sent to Guatemala mandating postmortem cesareans, see AGCA, A1–4642–39595, Libro de reales cédulas 1805–1807 [sic], “Real cédula sobre el modo con que se ha de executar la operación cesarea,” Aranjuez 13 de abril 1804, f. 16v–19v. For the authors who emphasize this real cédula as a key historical moment in the development of cesarean procedures, see the impor tant works of Rosemary Valle, “The Cesarean Operation in Alta California During the Franciscan Missionary Period (1769–1833),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974): 265–75; and

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José G. Rigau-Pérez, “Surgery at the Ser vice of Theology: Postmortem Cesarean Sections in Puerto Rico and the Royal Cédula of 1804,” Hispanic American Historical Review 75:3 (1995): 377–404. For Spain, Paula Demerson argued that the publication of Cangiamila’s Sacred Embryology in Spanish fueled the spread of cesareans there during the period of 1777 to 1806. See her article “La cesarea post mortem en la España de la Ilustración,” Ascelpio 28 (1976): 185–283. For more on postmortem cesareans as practiced in Europe, outside of medieval and early modern Iberia and colonial Latin America, see Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2006); and Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 16. See Adam Warren, “An Operation for Evangelization: Friar Francisco González Laguna, the Cesarean Section, and Fetal Baptism in Late Colonial Peru,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83:4 (2009): 650. See also his essay “Pastoral Zeal and ‘Treacherous’ Mothers: Ecclesiastical Debates about Cesarean Sections, Abortion, and Infanticide in Andean Peru, 1780–1810,” in “Women, Ethnicity, and Medical Authority: Historical Perspectives on Reproductive Health in Latin America,” edited by Tamera Marko and Adam Warren, 5–26, CILAS Working Papers 21 (2004): 7. 17. AGCA A1–6098–55547 (1785–86), f. 2–2v. Tests to ensure death had occurred in pregnant women included blowing smoke in their noses and mouths or pricking a finger under the nail. 18. AGCA A1–6101–55666, José Flores, “Ynstruccion para curar los tabardillos,” f. 9–10v. 19. AGCA, A1.22–1509-x, f. 114v. Officially, Guatemala was not a kingdom (reino), but instead an Audiencia. Yet, as is the case here, colonial documents did sometimes refer to colonial Guatemala as a “kingdom.” 20. Similar attempts at standardization can be seen in colonial treatments for smallpox inoculation and later vaccination, and in campaigns against typhus, measles, and tos ferina (epidemic cough, probably whooping cough). 21. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 5. 22. Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila, Compendio dell’embriologia sagra: O vero dell’uffizio de’ saceredoti, medici, e superiori circa l’eterna salute de’ bambini racciusi nell’utero (Palermo, Italy: F. Valenza, 1745). Cangiamila later became bishop of Palermo and the inquisitor of Sicily. 23. Demerson, “La cesárea post mortem en la España,” 197. See also José Pardo Tomás and Álvar Martínez Vidal, “The Ignorance of Midwives,” in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, 49–62 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). 24. See Hilary Marland, ed. The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (New York: Routledge, 1993), 181. The figure of 225 cesareans is found in Paul Pundel, Histoire de l’operation césarienne: Étude historique de la césarienne dans la médicine, l’art, et la littérature, les religions et la législation (Brussels: Presses Academiques Européenes, 1969), n7, 91, and is cited in Warren, “An Operation for Evangelization,” 652. 25. See Demerson, “La cesárea post mortem en la España,” for Spain and Warren, “An Operation for Evangelization,” for Peru. Charles III ruled the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily as Charles VII from 1734 to 1759. He ruled the Kingdom of Spain from 1759 to 1788.

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26. Rodríguez published the four volumes of New Aspects of Medical-Moral Theology between 1742 and 1767. 27. For more on this cohort, a good starting place is Pardo Tomás and Martínez Vidal, “The Ignorance of Midwives.” For a biography of Rodríguez, see Luis  S. Granjel, El pensamiento médico del Padre Antonio José Rodríguez (Salamanca, Spain: Publicaciones del Seminario de Historia de la Medicina de la Universidad de Salamanca, 1957). I am grateful to Roger Gathman for these references. 28. Rodríguez, Nuevo aspecto de Theología médico-moral, 44. Cited in Tomás and Vidal, “The Ignorance of Midwives,” 52. 29. For Guatemala, note that Iturbide’s 1788 postmortem cesarean manual explicitly refers to both Cangiamila and Rodríguez in the title: Breve y diminuto compendio de la obligación que hay de bautizar los fetos, sacado de las obras que dieron a luz D. Francisco Cangiamila, Canónigo Magistral de Palermo en su Embriologia Sagrada, y el Rmo. P. M. D. Antonio Joseph Rodríguez, Monge Cisterciense en su Nuevo Aspecto de Theologia Médico Moral. Cangiamila’s Sacred Embriology was published in Mexico in 1772. Rodríguez’s La caridad del sacerdote para con los niños encerrados en el vientre de sus madres difuntas was published in Mexico in 1773. A 1774 Spanish translation of Cangiamila’s work is located, for example, at the Biblioteca Nacional in Guatemala City: Embriologia Sagrada, o tratado de la obligación que tienen los curas, confesores, médicos, comadres, y otras personas, de cooperar a la salvacion de los niños que aun no han nacido, de los que nacen al parecer muertos, de los abortivos, de los monstruos, &c. (Madrid: Imprenta de Pedro Marín, 1774). I want to thank Karen Racine for her kindness in sending me a digitized copy of the 1773 Mexican publication of Ródriguez’s work that she found while researching at the Wellcome Library. For more information on the publication and translation chains of these works in Europe and the Americas, see Demerson, “La cesárea post mortem en la España,” 195–97; and Tomás and Vidal, “The Ignorance of Midwives,” 52–54. 30. Pedro de Arrese, Rudimentos físico- canónico-morales: O glosa al edicto del Ylustrísimo Señor Don Cayetano Francos y Monroy Dignísimo Arzobispo de Guatemala, publicado en veinte dos de diciembre del año de 1785. Sobre el bautismo de fetos abortivos y operación cesárea en las mugeres que mueren embarazadas (Nueva Guatemala: La Viuda de D. Sebastian de Arevalo, 1786). This work was reprinted in Guatemala in 1807. Arrese (?–1795) was born in Guatemala and studied at the Colegio de San Francisco de Borja and the University of San Carlos. He was a priest who held the position of Promotor Fiscal y Secretario for Archbishops Cayetano Francos Monroy and Juan Féliz de Villegas. He was working for Archbishop Francos y Monroy when he published his work on postmortem cesareans. 31. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto. Pedro Mariano Iturbide (?–?) was a missionary priest at the Colegio de Cristo Crucificado de Propaganda Fide in Guatemala’s capital. He held the positions of Guardián, Comisario Visitador, Presidente de Capítulo, and Comissario de Missiones. He also wrote on topics of philosophy, theological doctrine, and natural history. Diccionario Histórico Biográfico de Guatemala, 518. 32. The medical doctors that Estachería commissioned to write the Instruction were José Flores and José de Córdova, both professors in medicine at the Real Universidad de San Carlos, and Manuel Merlo, who it seems was a medical student at the university at that time. Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 283. 33. AGCA, A1–6098–55547, f. 1–17v. This copy of “Instructions” reached Huehuetenango and Totonicapán, areas located in the highlands with large Maya

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populations, in February of 1786. To date I have also located four other copies sent to various cities in the Audiencia. According to Durón in “La Operación Cesárea,” 73, the “Instruction” was also sent to all the major cities and towns in what is now Honduras from March through July of 1786, starting in Tegucigalpa and extending throughout the region. 34. Ibid., f. 1v. 35. Ibid., f. 3v. 36. Ibid., f. 14. 37. Ibid., f. 6. 38. Ibid., f. 14v. 39. Ibid., f. 14. 40. AGCA, A1–6098–55547, f. 14. 41. The two Guatemalan cesarean manuals and the instructions also referenced impor tant European medical intellectuals, such as German surgeon Wilhelm Fabry (aka William Fabry, Guilielmus Fabricius) and his publications on surgery in support of the procedure. See Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 41. There are numerous other such citation examples throughout the work. 42. Much of the research on shape-shifting in colonial Mesoamerica has tended to focus on the transformer him or herself and their animal forms, using the accounts as examples of Mesoamerican ritual power and authority that continued to resonate in significant ways during the colonial period and beyond. Ritual specialists, for example, act as community leaders in indigenous resistance to Spanish colonial rule or as examples of gendered authority and power in multiethnic social relations in colonial cities that I have explored in Women Who Live Evil Lives. For the modern era, see especially Neil L. Whitehead’s pioneering ethnography of the postcolonial politics of assault sorcery in Dark Shamans: Kanaima and the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 43. AGCA A1–4060–3160 (1705), f. 33–43v. 44. “[He is] very famous among Indian men and women for his power, and they are also afraid of him.” AGCA A1–4060–3160 (1705), f. 33v. 45. AGCA A1–4060–3160 (1687), f. 36v. 46. “Un sapito que era para maleficar,” AGCA A1–4060–3160 (1687), f. 33–43v; the toad could be destroyed by burning. In another example from this same investigation, Pedro Clarinero, reportedly cast an illness on married woman who refused to enter into a relationship with him that “damaged her secret parts,” f. 42v. 47. “Frogs and toads,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures: The Civilizations of Mexico and Central America, edited by David Carrasco, 421 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 48. AGN, Inq., vol. 644, exp. 2, September 16, 1693. 49. Ibid., September 21, 1695. No surname is given for Manuela. 50. Ibid. The unnamed man later died in the hospital in the city of Santiago de Guatemala. 51. “In Central and South America, ethnographic data reveal a close symbolic relationship between the jaguar, social status, warfare, and the wielding of spiritual and political power by shamans and chiefs.” Nicholas  J. Saunders, “Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites,” World Archaeology 26:1 (June 1994): 107. 52. AGCA A1–4929–42045, Santa Catarina Pinula (1660). This document is in bad shape, incomplete in some parts, and unreadable in others. The interpretation of this

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source is further complicated by the fact that most of the indigenous participants did not speak Spanish, including Marta de la Figueroa, and so their testimonies were interpreted by an appointed indigenous–Spanish language translator. The interpreter was Pedro [Cardona?], an indio ladino and scribe (f. 2). 53. “Gusanos,” AGCA A1–4929–42045, Santa Catarina Pinula (1660), f. 1v, 4–4v. No mention is made of a fetus or a birth. 54. AGCA A1–4929–42045, Santa Catarina Pinula (1660). Worms formed the signature animal of Figueroa’s malevolent sorcery that she reputedly used to intervene in pregnancy and as her agents of supernatural illness more broadly. 55. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación flórida, 3:157. 56. Ibid. 57. I thank Daniella Kostroun for pointing out this link and Bernard Dompnier, Le venin de l’heresie: Image du protestantisme et combat catholique au XVIIe siécle (Paris: Editions du Centurion, 1985). See also Martha Few, “Atlantic World Monsters: Monstrous Births and the Politics of Pregnancy in Colonial Guatemala,” in Women, Religion and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Lisa Vollendorf and Daniella Kostroun (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009): 205–22. 58. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación flórida, 3:399–401. 59. Ibid. 60. AGN, Inq., vol. 830, exp. 7, f. 100–128. The documentation that specifically refers to the monstrous birth comes primarily from f. 108f-v and 124f-v. 61. Ibid., 108v. 62. Ibid., 108–108v. 63. “Infeczion de maleficio,” ibid., 108v. 64. Francisco Sunzin de Herrera, Consulta práctico-moral en que se pregunta si los fetos abortivos se podran bautizar a lo menos debaxo de condición, a los primeros días de concebidos (Guatemala, CA: Imprenta Nueva de Sebastián de Arévalo, 1756), n.p. See section “Argumento sexto” for the excerpt. Emphasis is Sunzin de Herrera’s. Sunzin de Herrera was also an ecclesiastical judge in the Province of Verapaz. 65. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 23. 66. Arrese, Rudimentos físico- canónico-morales, 7. 67. See Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, who raised the specter of burying fetuses alive trapped in the womb: “in this way one comes to bury living fetuses together with their dead mothers” (5). 68. Janis B. Alcorn, Huastec Mayan Ethnobotany (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), 156–60. 69. For eighteenth- century complaints of the excessive delay of baptism, and of newborns dying without baptism because of the resistance of indigenous parents to the ritual see for example Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:271 (Valle de Copán) and 277 (Chiquimula). For Mesoamerican alternative birth rituals, see Fray Francisco Montero de Miranda, “Descripción de la provincia de Verapaz (ca. 1574),” Anales de la sociedad de geografia e historia de Guatemala 27 (1954): 342–58. Cortés y Larraz saw baptism conflicts as a significant and widespread problem in the towns in Zumpango parish, where alternatives to Christian baptism and/or a possible healing ritual after birth came to the attention of the parish priest there. Córtes y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:78–81. 70. Córtes y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:90. 71. Ibid., 2:80.

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72. The information in this paragraph comes from Sunzin de Herrera, Consulta práctico-moral en que se pregunta si los fetos abortivos se podran bautizar, n.p.; located in the section “Fundamento Tercero.” According to Jacques Roger, Aristotelian theories of fetal development were revived in the first half of the eighteenth century. See his The Life Sciences in Eighteenth- Century French Thought, edited by Keith Benson, translated by Robert Ellrich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 232–34. Thank you to Roger Gathman for this reference. Cathy McClive has found that in early modern France, fetal animation was thought to occur at the point of quickening, that is, at the point of fetal movement in the uterus, thought to occur between the second and fourth month of pregnancy. See her article “The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe,” Social History of Medicine 15:2 (2002): 211–12. 73. Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières, par une société de gens de lettres (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Stoupe, 1782–92), 2:688–89. I thank Roger Gathman for this reference and insight. 74. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 21–22. 75. AGCA, A1–4642–39595, Libro de reales cédulas 1805–1807 [sic], “Real cédula sobre el modo con que se ha de executar la operación cesarea,” Aranjuez (April 13, 1804), f. 16v–19v. 76. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 23. 77. Gazeta de Guatemala, August 19, 1799, 90. “El Viejo Lecornes” sent in this information. Authors of articles and letters published in the Gazeta often used pseudonyms. John Tate Lanning has identified El Viejo Lecornes as José Antonio Goicoechea, though Lanning notes an alternative spelling, “Licornes.” See Lanning, The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos, 87n29. Note also another layer of circulation as El Viejo Lecornes writes that this “warning” is an excerpt from a longer warning from the protomédico of New Spain (based in Mexico City), José Ignacio García Jove. 78. Gazeta de Guatemala, August 19, 1799, 90. 79. Ibid. 80. Iturbide, for example, explicitly describes the uterus as a fetus’s “prison” in Breve y Diminuto, 31. 81. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 46. Note that the page numbering in this work is not consecutive and is missing in spots; in this instance, p. 46 comes between p. 38 and p. 41. 82. Gazeta de Guatemala, May 13, 1799, 31–32. The article of the author is listed as “S.C.” 83. Ibid., 31. 84. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 49. It is difficult to tell from the description whether Iturbide witnessed this or if he is repeating an account that he read in another cesarean manual. The Gazeta de México published a short announcement that a postmortem cesarean had been performed on a fetus at the fi fth month of development in utero, reporting that the fetus lived long enough to be baptized before it expired, further justifying the procedure even at early stages of pregnancy. “Chiautla de la Sal,” Gazeta de Mexico, June 1, 1795, 298. Thanks to Ryan Kashanipour for bringing this source to my attention. 85. Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 30–31.

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86. AGCA A1–6098–55547, f. 12v–13. 87. Narciso Esparragosa y Gallardo, Memoria sobre una invención fácil y sencilla para extraer las criaturas clavadas en el paso sin riesgo de su vida, ni ofensa de la madre, y para extraer la cabeza que ha quedado en el útero separada del cuerpo (Nueva Guatemala: d. Ignacio Betata, 1798). The pamphlet was first published in Guatemala and then later reprinted in Barcelona. 88. Esparragosa, Memoria sobre una invención fácil, 3. 89. Despite the focus on postmortem cesareans starting in the 1780s, the medicalization of childbirth did not begin during the late colonial period in any kind of significant way. University medical cultures and its professors and students, such as Esparragosa and his asa elástica, do show, however, that medical professionals were teaching, writing, and experimenting with different aspects of pregnancy and childbirth at the time. 90. AGCA A1–6098–55547, f. 3v. 91. Francos y Monroy’s excommunication penalty is reprinted in Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 38. 92. AGCA, A1.22–1509-x, n.p. 93. AGCA A1–6098–55547, f. 3v. 94. Arrese, Rudimentos físico- canónico-morales, 34; Iturbide, Breve y diminuto, 38. 95. The case studies of fetal death and miscarriage because of physical violence all took place three or more years after the Audiencia mandated postmortem cesareans. The goal was to complicate the category of fetus to attempt to see patterns in attitudes toward fetuses and pregnant women in practice through documents generated by the legal system, the pronouncements and actions of law enforcement officials, and through the testimonies men and women who became entangled in these proceedings during the late 1780s and 1790s. I do not have a random sample of such cases. I looked through all the criminal case descriptions in the fichero (card catalogue) of the AGCA for 1788–99 that involved violence against women. I selected all those that had fichero summaries that described pregnant or recently pregnant women who experienced violence and miscarriage (mal parto and aborto). This certainly provides an undercount of such cases, however, because fichero cards that described violence against women did not in every case mention miscarriage in the summary, even though once I read through a case, sometimes I found descriptions of miscarriage as part of the violence accounts. See for example AGCA A2.2–185–3699, whose fichero summary did not mention a murdered woman’s suspected pregnancy, nor did it mention that the surgeon performed a cesarean during the autopsy. I discovered this only by reading through the case documentation. There are at least two other examples that I do not analyze in this chapter, but that show similar findings to what I have described here: AGCA A2.2–189–3839, “Josefa Peralta contra su marido Albino Sierra por malos tratamientos”; and AGCA A2.2–182–3608, “Criminales contra Andrés María Chamale por palos a su mujer que resultó mal parto.” 96. Gazeta de Guatemala, October 1, 1804, 453. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 453–54: “Fué pues el caso que estando ya dicha Nicolasa cercana a morir, y habiendo mandado el cura al barbero (que era indio), a quien habia instruído en las operaciones antecedentes.”

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100. No surnames were given to the Indian cesarean performers Narciso and Silvestre. Valle, “The Cesarean Operation in Alta California,” 265–75. 101. Gazeta de Guatemala, October 1, 1804, 453. 102. Lanning, The Royal Protomedicato, 314. 103. This issue and Luna’s role are discussed later in this chapter. 104. The royal scribe was Sebastián González. AGCA A2.2–185–3699, f. 1. 105. AGCA A2.2–185–3699, f. 2. 106. “Vientre,” ibid. 107. AGCA A2.2–185–3699, f. 2v. 108. AGCA A2.2–185–3699, f. 3v–4. 109. AGCA A2.2–185–3699, f. 4. 110. Ibid. 111. For a comparative history of violence and miscarriage in medieval England from a legal history perspective, see Sara M. Butler, “Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth- Century England,” Journal of Women’s History 17:4 (Winter 2005): 9–31. Thanks to Zeb Tortorici for suggesting this source. On colonial legal trials for sexual violence against women, see also Catherine Komisaruk’s article “Rape Narratives, Rape Silences: Sexual Violence and Judicial Testimony in Colonial Guatemala,” Biography 31:3 (Summer 2008): 369–96. 112. AGCA A2.2–123–3444, f. 1. 113. AGCA A2.2–123–3444, f. 1v. 114. Ibid., f. 1v. 115. Ibid., f. 1v–2; the image is found on f. 2. 116. This is the same Narciso Esparragosa who was the author of the asa elástica pamphlet. 117. AGCA A2.2–123–3444. Mexicanos’s testimony is recorded on f. 1v–2v. 118. AGCA A2.2–123–3444, f. 3v–4. Esparragosa also says that “una coléra brought on by the anger and pain of the event” helped to cause the miscarriage. 119. This was not an uncommon length of time to be held before testifying. 120. AGCA A2.2–123–3444, f. 15: “por la complicidad que se le impreta [sic] en el aborto de Feliciana Margarita Mexicanos.” 121. Ibid., f. 16. 122. AGCA A2.2–166–3315, f. 1–27v. “Golpeado” is most likely a nickname; it means “beaten one.” A golpe is a blow. 123. Ibid., f. 2. 124. Ibid., f. 9v. 125. Arrese, Rudimentos fisico- canonico-morales, 1. 126. AGCA A2.2–166–3315, f. 9v. 127. Ibid., f. 10v. 128. Ibid., f. 9v. Villalta called the miscarried fetus “tal hijo.” 129. Ibid., f. 7. 130. Ibid., f. 10v. Pacheco added that in addition to the bloodletting, Luna also administered “una untura caliente en el vientre,” roughly translated as “a warm anointing of the uterus.” 131. Ibid.; all her testimony is located on f. 5.

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132. Ibid., f. 1v: “Bastante [h]istérica según pareze, por ser propenza a padecer esas pribaciones estéricas [sic—should be ‘[h]istéricas’].” 133. He also testifies that the beating caused “irritación de la cólera.” Esparragosa also mentioned una cólera in the Feliciana Mexicanos case. This can be translated as wrath, anger, spleen, and bile. 134. It seems that this is the same Severino Luna who would, in 1799, perform one of the Petén postmortem cesareans as the presidio surgeon there. 135. AGCA A2.2–166–3315, f. 12. 136. Ibid., f. 11. 137. “Y dar parta a la Justicia ignora si nacio viva o muerta.” AGCA A2.2–166–3315, f. 12. 138. “Le dixeron que havia recibido [la criatura] el agua de Baptismo.” Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. “Se viene en conocimiento de que nació viva.” Ibid. 141. Ibid., f. 5v. 142. AGCA A1.15–2935–27562, f. 1–3. The wife, a tributary Indian, is not named in any of the documents. 143. Lorenzo Montúfar was alcalde mayor of Amatitanes and Sacatepéquez, which had Santa Catarina Pinula in its jurisdiction. 144. AGCA A1.15–2935–27562, f. 2. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid., f. 2–2v. 147. Asociación para el Fomento de los Estudios Históricos en Centroamérica, Ficha no. 1274, “Venta de esclava en el vientre de su madre,” transcribed by Elizet Payne Iglesias, Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, Protocolos coloniales de Cartago (January 7, 1779) f. 10v, accessed May 11, 2010, http://afehc-historia- centroamericana.org. All of the material related to this issue is located here. In the sources, Doña Manuela’s surname is alternately spelled “Savaleta.” No surname is provided for the slave Manuela. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid. 150. Slave status conferred to newborns of enslaved women was based on Roman law that continued to be used in Spanish and Portuguese colonies. For more on this, and on Brazil’s “Free Womb Law” of 1871 that formed part of the legal development of eventual slave manumission in Brazil, see Martha Abreu, “Slave Mothers and Freed Children: Emancipation and Female Space in Debates on the ‘Free Womb’ Law, Rio de Janeiro, 1871,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28:3 (October 1996): 567–80. Thanks to B. J. Barickman for this reference. 151. “Confieso que bendí y vendo la nominada mulatilla esclava desde el vientre de su madre, por los expresos veinte cinco pesos de plata.” Protocolos coloniales de Cartago, f. 10v. 152. Palma’s title is listed as “partera de las Negras Esclavas de S[u] M[agestad].” AGCA A3.2–290–6187, “De los pagamentos a la partera” (1783), f. 1. 153. Information on the slave births are found in AGCA A3.2–290–6187, f. 1–4. The twins, born to María Manuela Guamogo and Palqual Eneque, were baptized and named José Antonio and María Antonia.

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Notes to Pages 133–137

Chapter 4 1. At this time, Chiapas was also an Intendancy, and so Cuentas y Zayas also held the title Intendant. AGCA A1.1–16–424, Informe del Real Protomedicato al Presidente, Nueva Guatemala (April 23, 1795), f. 25; AGI Estado 36, n. 55 (1796–99): Resumen de Secretaria sobre que Don Agustín de las Quentas Zayas, Gobernador e Intendente de la Provincia de Chiapa, ha pedido en atención a sus méritos y servicios (August 8, 1799). Note that the governor’s name is sometimes also spelled “Agustín de las Quentas Zayas.” 2. According to the sources, the two main roads that he closed were the road to the ancient Maya site of Palenque, and the steep main road called the Campanario de Pa[n]tanos. No further information is provided on the men or the quarantine line. AGCA A1.4.7–6059–53824, carta del [fiscal] Bataller al Presidente de la Audiencia, Nueva Guatemala (October 3, 1794), f. 1. Conversations with Laura Matthew and Kevin Gosner on Chiapas and highland Guatemala geography and colonial roads were invaluable for this chapter, as were Gall’s monumental Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala and Thomas A. Lee Jr. and Carlos Navarrete, eds., Mesoamerican Communication Routes and Cultural Contacts (Provo, UT: New World Archaeological Foundation, Brigham Young University, 1978). 3. AGCA A1.4.7–6059–53824, f.1. 4. AGCA A1.1–16–424, “Informe del Real Protomedicato al Presidente,” Nueva Guatemala (April 23, 1795), f. 25–26; AGI, Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores, Madrid (February  28, 1803), f. 329–29v. During the first two hundred years of Spanish colonial rule, Totonicapán formed part of the corregimiento or alcaldía mayor of Totonicapán and Huehuetenango. In the later in colonial period, the region was formally separated into two partidos or districts, Totonicapán and Huehuetenango. 5. AGCA A1.1–16–424, Consulta de la junta del Protomedicato, Nueva Guatemala (October 14, 1794), f. 5. 6. AGI Guatemala 648, Presidente de la Audiencia de Guatemala al Rey, Nueva Guatemala (March 6, 1796). 7. AGCA A1–49–1211, “Sobre cump.to de la Rl. cedula de ereccion del Trib.1 de Protomedicato de esta ciudad, y titulo de primer Protomédico de Dr. Flores” (1793), n.p. See also Lanning, The Eighteenth- Century Enlightenment, 230; Lanning, The Royal Protomedicato, 338, 341; and Aznar López, El doctor don José de Flores, 68, 102. 8. Lanning, The 18th Century Enlightenment in the University of San Carlos, 230. 9. Ibid., 195–99, 230; Luigi Galvani, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius (Bologna, 1791). 10. The Audiencia Promotor Fiscal coordinated between the Protomedicato and the president of the Audiencia on this issue. See AGCA A1.1–16–424, f. 3. In the 1780s, the Audiencia of Guatemala shifted its political organi zation to the intendency system as part of the Bourbon reforms. In the 1790s, colonial sources constantly switched back and forth between the language of the old system (alcaldes mayores and alcaldías mayores, for example) and that of the new intendancies. 11. AGI Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1803), f. 329. 12. A legua is a distance of roughly three miles. AGI Guatemala 648, “Estado de los Párbulos que sufrieron el contagio de viruelas en . . . el curato de Soloma y . . .

Notes to Pages 137–139

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Jacaltenango en la Provincia de Totonicapán,” Francisco Chamorro, Totonicapán (October 19, 1795); AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, Santa Eulalia (September 6, 1795), f. 7–16. 13. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 1:123. For more details on salt making in San Mateo Ixtatán, see Gall, Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala, 3:430. 14. Cortés y Larraz, Descripción geográfico-moral, 2:128. 15. Ibid., 2:129. 16. Ibid., 2:130. 17. Ibid., 2:128. 18. AGI Guatemala 648, copia 1, carta de Fray José Camposeco y Lorenzana a la Audiencia, Jacaltenango (September 16, 1795). 19. AGI Guatemala 648, carta al Presidente de la Audiencia de Francisco Chamorro, Santa Ana Huista (August 19, 1795). 20. Carolyn Hall and Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 146–47. 21. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). 22. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Ordenes para los que cuidan los caminos,” Huehuetenango (August 6, 1795), f. 1–2. The terms used are “comisario” and “guarda” for the leader, and “soldado” and “indio” for the men under their command. The guard post at San Juan Ixcoy had two comisarios because of its strategic importance to the quarantine network. 23. AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 10v. 24. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Ordenes para los que cuidan los caminos,” f. 1v; carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 7v. The monthly salaries for quarantine checkpoint positions show the semi-permanence of these positions over the course of an outbreak, which usually lasted for a number of months. 25. Hall and Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America, 144. 26. Chamorro’s title is listed as capitán de milicias en este reyno de Guatemala. What I have been able to uncover about Chamorro comes from his méritos y servicios, submitted as he sought a more prestigious position on the basis of his substantive role in introducing inoculation in the 1790s. See AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). 27. Chamorro’s father lost his life during a 1779 military expedition led by president of the Audienca and Colonel Matías de Gálvez against British forces along the Atlantic coast. This information on Chamorro can be found in AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). For more on this expedition, see Hall and Brignoli, Historical Atlas of Central America, 146–47. 28. AGI Guatemala 648, Presidente de la Audiencia de Guatemala al Rey. 29. Cozar was born in Toledo, Spain, though his birth and death dates are unknown. His full title at the time was “teniente coronel comandante del regimiento de ynfanteria de milicias provinciales regladas de dha Prov.a.” AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 4. 30. These include uprisings in Santa María Chiquimula (1802), and Chalchitán (1808), and especially the 1820 rebellion in Totonicapán by Atanasio Tzul and Lucas Aguilar. The biographical information on Cozar here comes from Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala, 310. For more on these Indian rebellions, see Severo

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Notes to Pages 139–141

Martínez Peláez, Motines de Indios, 2nd ed. (Guatemala, CA: Ediciones en Marcha, 1991). For the Tzul rebellion, see Aaron Pollack, Levantamiento K’iche’ en Totonicapán, 1820: Los lugares de las políticas subalternas (Guatemala, CA: AVANCSO, 2008). 31. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Ordenes para los que cuidan los caminos,” f. 1v–2. 32. Ibid., f. 1. 33. AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 7. 34. “Otras muchas veredas practicables solo por los Yndios.” AGCA A1.1–16–424, “El Sr. Protomédico [y] los facultatibos,” Nueva Guatemala (September 18, 1794), f. 2. 35. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fray Domingo González al Presidente de la Audiencia, San Pedro Soloma (October 12, 1795), copy. 36. “Por barrancos, y precipicios de[s]conocidos, y distantes de las guardias.” A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 4v. 37. Neither the man nor his nephew were named in the sources; the boy was described as “un indito muy contagiado.” Tajumulco was the only town in Quetzaltenango that became infected with smallpox during the 1794–95 epidemic. A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 5. “Pasé alla al momento y lo retiré a 7 leguas del poblado en una milpa distante de otras casas que alli hay” (f. 4v). 38. “El paso de su comercio,” AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). 39. In August of 1795, there were at least three pillories located at quarantine guard posts at San Antonio Huista, San Miguel Acatán, and San Juan Ixcoy. AGCA A1–191– 3904, “Ordenes para los que cuidan los caminos,” Huehuetenango (August 6, 1795), f. 1–2. 40. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Santa Ana Huista, (August 19, 1795). 41. Ibid. 42. AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 10–10v. The Marqués de Aycinena (1729–96) migrated from Spain to New Spain in 1748 and settled in Guatemala in 1753. He initially worked as a transporter of goods and animals. A series of strategic marriages and his business skills led him to amass wealth and gain access to elite colonial society. He eventually became an indigo exporter and an importer of luxury goods to Guatemala. King Charles III named him marqués in 1783. Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala, 150. For more on Aycinena, see Richmond F. Brown, Juan Fermín de Aycinena: Central American Colonial Entrepreneur, 1729–1796 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); and Gustavo Palma Murga, “Between Fidelity and Pragmatism: Guatemala’s Commercial Elite Responds to Bourbon Reforms on Trade and Contraband,” in Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, edited by Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 114–38. 43. Each man was paid a salary of twelve pesos per month, AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 8. 44. The length given in the sources is 77 3/4 leguas, and at 3 miles per legua, results in approximately 233 miles. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a Real Audiencia, f. 7v.

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45. AGCA A1–389–8102, carta de Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 1v–2v; AGCA A1–389–8102, “Gastos para la aislación del contagio de viruelas de Don Prudencio de Cozar, corregidor de la Provincia de Quetzaltenango” (July 9, 1796), f. 14. 46. Each was described as “a colonel in these militias.” For more on militias in colonial Central America, see Paul Lokken, “Useful Enemies: Seventeenth- Century Piracy and the Rise of Pardo Militias in Spanish Central America,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5:2 (2004). For comparative look, see for example Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and the special issue on militias in the colonial Americas edited by Vinson in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5:2 (2004). 47. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 1v–2. 48. Town residents were identified as vecinos. 49. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 1v–2 50. Ibid., f. 1v. 51. Both were located in the Intendancy of Chiapas. 52. This guard received a salary of ten pesos per month. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 2 53. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 4v. 54. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (January 21, 1796), f. 7v. 55. AGI Guatemala 648, “Estado de los Párbulos que sufrieron el contagio de viruelas en . . . el curato de Soloma y . . . Jacaltenango en la Provincia de Totonicapán,” Francisco Chamorro, Totonicapán (October 19, 1795), copia. Officials sometimes distinguished between smallpoxes using the terms “viruela buena” (good smallpox) to identify inoculation smallpox cases, and “mala viruela” (bad smallpox) to refer to natural smallpox. See AGI Estado 36, n. 55 (1796–99), “Resumen de Secretaria sobre que Don Agustín de las Quentas Zayas, Gobernador e Intendente de la Provincia de Chiapa, ha pedido en atención a sus méritos y servicios” (August 8, 1799). Thanks to Max Mangraviti for bringing this source to my attention. 56. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 12–12v. 57. No cases of blindness were reported among the inoculated. Ibid., f. 7. 58. Hidalgo was paid 24 pesos for this work. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (January 21, 1796), f. 5; and “Gastos de Don Prudencio de Cozar . . . sobre la aislación del contagio de viruelas,” f. 14. 59. Flores, Instrucción, 3. 60. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (February 26, 1796). 61. AGCA A1–389–8102, “Gastos de Don Prudencio de Cozar . . . sobre la aislación del contagio de viruelas,” f. 14. 62. Ibid., f. 15. 63. Flores, Instrucción, 10.

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Notes to Pages 144–147

64. The military officer is described as el teniente (the lieutenant) in the sources. 65. That is, until the age of children who had been born since the previous epidemic, and any adults who had not been exposed to smallpox. 66. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Nueva Guatemala (May 31, 1800). 67. In my article “Circulating Smallpox Knowledge: Guatemalan Doctors, Maya Indians, and Designing Spain’s Smallpox Vaccination Expedition, 1780–1806,” British Journal for the History of Science 43:4 (December 2010): 519–37, I had interpreted this as cutting their skin for inoculation. But a review of the original archival document shows that inoculations in this instance did begin with cutting all the children’s hair (se les hacía cortar el pelo para hacerles menos sensible la enfermedad). I have not seen this step used outside of colonial Guatemala. Additionally, Adam Warren says that he has not seen this practice in the Andes. Adam Warren, personal communication, June 20, 2012. 68. Flores, Instrucción, 9. 69. I say “he” here as I have not yet found any documentary evidence that women performed inoculations in official antismallpox campaigns in colonial Guatemala. But of course that does not necessarily mean that women did not do so. We do know that in the colonial period some female healers were blood specialists—accomplished and sought-after medicinal bloodletters. 70. Flores, Instrucción, 4. 71. Ibid., 5. Flores also suggested that a skilled inoculator might inoculate children carefully while they slept as another way to avoid scaring them. The original method proposed to raise blisters for inoculation using the beetle poultice can be found in Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, 5. 72. Flores, Instrucción, 4. 73. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798), f. 2, 3. 74. Ibid., 5.; Chamorro also mentions the Indian characterization of inoculation as a diabolical art in AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Totonicapán (October 26, 1795). 75. AGI Guatemala 648, “Certificación de Fray José Camposeco Lorenzana,” Jacaltenango (October 3, 1795). 76. “Los Indios pueden facilmente sobstituir sus puntas afiliadas de Chayes con que se acostumbran sangrar.” Flores, Instrucción, 5. “Chayes” is the plural of “chay.” 77. Schele and Miller, The Blood of Kings. I only scratch the surface here of the ritual importance of blood in ancient and colonial Maya cultures. 78. The ritual and medical aspects of Maya culture were not separated out in theory and in practice. I am doing so here to make the analysis clearer for readers. 79. See Bartolomé de las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, edited by Edmundo O’Gorman, 2 vols., 2:514–15 (Mexico, DF: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1967), cited in Sandra Orellana, Indian Medicine in Highland Guatemala: The Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Periods (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 60. 80. Ximénez, Historia natural, 328. Bernal Díaz was a foot soldier for Hernán Cortés during the conquest of the Mexica (Aztecs) at Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

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See Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera De La Conquista de la Nueva España, 4th ed. (Mexico, DF: Porrúa, 1955 [1588]). 81. Ximénez, Historia natural, 329–30. 82. Ibid., 328. 83. Ibid., 329. 84. Flores, Instrucción, 5. 85. Ibid. 86. Ximénez, Historia natural, 329. 87. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Nueva Guatemala (May 31, 1800). 88. AGI Guatemala 423, carta de Don Francisco Machado sobre el informe de Don Nicolás Obregón, Madrid (August 7, 1788). 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. The salary receipts also show other types of inoculators present. See AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 8. 92. Flores, Instrucción, 3. 93. Ibid. 94. AGI Guatemala 648, “Método en que se practicó la inoculación de viruelas en los pueblos de los ferozos Indios Manes, y Pocomanes, situado cerca de las montañas de los Indios bravos Lacandones en esta governación de Guatemala” (February 3, 1798). 95. Ibid. 96. Flores, Instrucción. 97. Ibid., 4. 98. Ibid., 4, 6, 13. 99. Alcalde Mayor Chamorro did, however, referred to “parents” as collectively present and upset during the haircutting stage that took place in the town square just before inoculation. 100. AGI Guatemala 648, “Método en que se practicó.” 101. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). 102. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Sebastián Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Totonicapán (October 26, 1795). 103. AGI Guatemala 648, “Estado de los párbulos que sufrieron el contagio de viruelas” (October 19, 1795). 104. AGCA A1–389–8102, f.7, 37v. 105. Ibid. Cozar did not identify the caretaker. 106. AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 7v–8. 107. Ibid. Chamorro also initially hired a young man to assist the maestro for a salary of 4 reales per day, but in the end decided he did not need him. 108. AGCA A1–389–8102, Prudencio de Cozar a la Real Audiencia, Quetzaltenango (October 5, 1795), f. 5. 109. Ibid., f. 37 v. 110. Ibid. Note that this amount also included the salary paid to the inoculator. Cozar did not name the inoculator.

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Notes to Pages 152–156

111. AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 9. 112. Flores, Instrucción, 13. 113. Ibid., 13–14. 114. It is unclear if inoculation officials took this separate quarantine step in Totonicapán and Quetzaltenango at this time. It is also unclear what the other woman’s children would do if she were inoculated separately with one of her children. Flores, Instrucción, 4. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., 8–9. 117. The 1791 reissue of the postmortem cesarean mandate is an exact copy of the original 1785 mandate. See AGCA A1.22–1509-x (no expediente number), “Don José Estachería del Consejo de su Magestad, Brigadier de los Reales Exercitos, Gobernador y Capitán General de este Reyno de Guatemala . . . se establesca en este Reyno la operación Cesaria . . . ,” Nueva Guatemala (May 24, 1791), f. 114–15. For another copy of the reissued postmortem cesarean mandate, see also A1.22–2589–21112, with same place and date of issue. 118. Flores, Instrucción, 9. 119. Ibid., 7. Because the source clearly refers to “pregnant women,” then criatura here refers to the fetus. 120. Ibid. 121. “A las criaturas de pecho, les suelen salir Viruelas en las narizes, y tapandoselas, les impiden respirar quando maman, y asi tendra gran cuidado de labarselas.” Here “criatura” refers to an infant. Ibid., 8. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid., 7. 124. AGI Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1803), f. 329v. 125. Flores, Instrucción, 8. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 6. 130. Ibid. 5. 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. Atole is a corn-based beverage often sweetened. It is still consumed in parts of Central America and Mexico today. 133. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Nosotros los alcaldes del pueblo de Santa Eulalia,” receipt for distribution of community chest funds by their priest to aid the sick (May 30, 1795), f. 3. 134. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Nosotros los alcaldes del pueblo de Santa Eulalia” (June 8, 1795), f. 3v; (June 19, 1795), f. 3v–4; and (July 4, 1795), f. 4–4v. 135. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Nosotros los alcaldes del pueblo de San Matheo Ixtatán,” receipts for distribution of community chest funds by their priest to aid the sick (May 4, 1795), f. 5; (May 16, 1795), f. 5v; (May 25, 1795), f. 5v–6. 136. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fray Domingo González al Presidente de la Audiencia, San Pedro Soloma (October 12, 1795), copia.

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137. AGCA A1–389–8102, carta del corregidor de Quetzaltenango a la Audiencia, 16 febrero 1796, f. 7. 138. This illness was also known as Saint Anthony’s Fire. AGI, Guatemala 648, “Estado de los Parbulos que sufrieron el contagio de viruelas,” Totonicapán (October 19, 1795), copy. 139. Ibid. 140. Agustín de las Cuentas Zayas, the intendant of Chiapas, made just such a comparison his postinoculation census that he submitted to the Spanish Crown to further quantify its success. AGI, Estado 37, n. 55, “Gobernador de Chiapa sobre Sanidad.” 141. AGI Guatemala 648, copia 1, carta de Fray José Camposeco y Lorenzana a la Audiencia. 142. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Totonicapán (October 26, 1795). 143. “La mas celosa policia conservarles a SM los numerosos pueblos que paso bajo su proteccion.” AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Sebastián Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Santa Ana Guista (August 19, 1795). “Los Huistas” refers collectively to the towns of Santa Ana Guista and San Antonio Guista. 144. The term used is “hijos del pecho.” AGI Estado 36, n. 55 (1796–99), “Resumen de Secretaria sobre que Don Agustín de las Quentas Zayas, Gobernador e Intendente de la Provincia de Chiapa, ha pedido en atención a sus méritos y servicios” (August 8, 1799). 145. AGI Guatemala 648, “Método en que se practicó.” See also AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Totonicapán (October 26, 1795) for a similar association of Spanish sorcery with antityphus campaigns in the 1790s. 146. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Totonicapán (October 26, 1795). 147. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fray José Camposeco Lorenzana a la Audiencia, Jacaltenango (October 3, 1795). 148. AGI Guatemala 648, no. 3, carta de Nosotros los alcaldes, calpules y de este nuestro pueblo de San Juan Ixcoy al Presidente de la Audiencia (undated), copy, October 1, 1795. 149. AGCA A1–191–3904, “Ordenes para los que cuidan los caminos,” Huehuetenango (August 6, 1795), f. 1–2. 150. “Pues entró la peste en nuestros vecinos los de San Mateo como fuego en el monte que quemaba toda la leña.” A more literal translation would read “the epidemic entered our neighbors [living] in San Mateo [Ixtatán] as a mountain fire burns [through] all the wood.” AGI Guatemala 648, no. 3. 151. AGI Guatemala 648, no. 3. 152. AGI Guatemala 648, no. 4, carta del Presidente José Domas y Valle a los alcaldes, calpules, y principales de San Juan Ixcoy, Nueva Guatemala (August 29, 1795), copy, October 1, 1795. 153. Ibid. The primer alcalde was also the primer calpul, the lineage head of the most impor tant indigenous family in the town. 154. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente, San Pedro Soloma (October 4, 1795). 155. Ibid.

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156. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fray Domingo González al Presidente, San Pedro Soloma (October 12, 1795), copy. 157. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). He uses this same phrase in requesting another position in AGI Guatemala 648 carta de Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (May 3, 1800). 158. AGI Guatemala 648, copia 1, carta de Fray José Camposeco y Lorenzana a la Audiencia. 159. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Santa Ana Huista (August 19, 1795). 160. Kevin Gosner notes that in the aftermath of rebellions, colonial officials used reducción/reduccionar (to forcibly gather Indians in one place) to reimpose order. See Kevin Gosner, Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Maya Rebellion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993). 161. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fray Domingo González al Presidente de la Audiencia, San Pedro Solomá (October 12, 1795), copy. 162. Ibid. 163. AGI Guatemala 648, “Método en que se practicó.” 164. AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 7. 165. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Fray Domingo González al Presidente de la Audiencia, San Pedro Soloma (October 12, 1795), copy; AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 7–7v. 166. AGI Guatemala 648, no. 40, carta del Presidente de la Audiencia José Domas y Valle al Rey, Nueva Guatemala (October 1, 1795). 167. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Guatemala (February 3, 1798). I have not been able to uncover any more details about this event. 168. AGI Guatemala 648, no. 40, carta del Presidente de la Audiencia José Domas y Valle al Rey, Nueva Guatemala (October 1, 1795). 169. Ibid. 170. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Presidente de la Audiencia, Santa Ana Huista (August 19, 1795). In this letter Chamorro neglected to mention that he had not organized enough inoculators to inoculate everyone in the town, though he does mention this aspect of the inoculation campaign in a later report to the Audiencia that was forwarded to the Spanish crown. See AGI Guatemala 648, “Estado de los Parbulos que sufrieron el contagio de viruelas en . . . el curato de Soloma y . . . Jacaltenango en la Provincia de Totonicapan,” Francisco Chamorro, Totonicapán (October 19, 1795), copy. 171. Flores, Instrucción, 5. 172. AGI Guatemala 648, “Estado de los Párbulos.” 173. AGI Guatemala 648, copia 1, carta de Fray José Camposeco y Lorenzana a la Audiencia. See also AGCA A1–191–3904, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Superior Gobierno, f. 7–7v. 174. This description formed part of a letter Chamorro wrote that recounted his ser vice fighting the smallpox epidemic in Totonicapán during this 1795 epidemic that he used to request a more prestigious political position (he requested at least two, the intendency of San Salvador and the corregimiento of Quetzaltenango). He mentioned that he regularly read the Gazeta de Madrid, the Spanish newspaper that circulated to

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the Audiencia of Guatemala, to check for his name on the list of royal appointments. AGI Guatemala 648, carta de Francisco Chamorro al Rey, Nueva Guatemala (May 31, 1800).

Chapter 5 1. Jenner’s first paper published on the topic, “An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variola Vaccinae,” contains twenty-three examples of vaccination with cowpox that he used to make his case. This paper was published in Edward Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variola Vaccinae (London: Sampson Low, 1798). 2. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, Reglamento para la propagación y estabilidad de la vacuna en el Reyno de Guatemala (Nueva Guatemala: D. Ignacio Beteta, 1805), n.p. 3. “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 25, 1804, 337. Note: page should be labeled 137 but the issue is mispaginated. 4. AGI, Indiferente General, 1558H. 5. Ibid. 6. With respect to smallpox vaccination, public health officials continued to rely on interested persons outside the formally trained and licensed medical community to inoculate Guatemala residents into the late nineteenth century and continued to publish vaccination handbooks for their use. See for example Museo del Libro (hereafter ML), Instrucciones sobre la vacuna para las personas extrañas a la medicina que quieran prestar este servicio en los lugares donde se carece de facultativo (Guatemala, CA: Tipografía “La Unión,” 1890). The title translates as “Vaccination Instructions for Persons Outside the Medical Profession, Volunteering to Serve in Places that Lack Physicians or Surgeons with Medical Degrees (Facultativos).” 7. “Viruelas,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 14, 1802, 142–45. This 1802 outbreak proved mild and limited. Concern would resurface again that the 1804 smallpox outbreak would have particularly high mortality rates. AGCA A1–6108–55975, carta de Juan de Molina al alcalde mayor Prudencio de Cozar, Malacatán (January 5, 1804), n.p. 8. “Viruelas,” Gazeta de Guatemala, 142. 9. As chapter 1 discusses, many cities in the Americas already had the cowpox vaccine by the time the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition representatives arrived, including Puerto Rico and Guatemala, much to the frustration of the expedition’s leader Francisco Xavier Balmis. Audiencia medical doctors obtained live vaccine in May 1804 and began widespread vaccination in the capital before the arrival of the Balmis expedition. Pastor, a member of the expedition, did not arrive in Chiapas until July 1804, and from there traveled to Nueva Guatemala, finally arriving in August of the same year. 10. Technically, José Córdova held the title of interim protomédico while José Flores remained on leave and working in Europe. Flores would never return to Guatemala. Other members of the junta included Narciso Esparragosa (who at that time held the prestigious royal title Cirujano honorario de Cámara), [?] Guerra, Vicente Carranza, Pedro Molina, Mariano Larrave, and Manuel Merlo.

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Notes to Pages 167–168

11. In later years after the vaccine had arrived in Guatemala, Audiencia residents, medical doctors, and lay persons alike were legally prohibited from using inoculation with human smallpox matter because of the danger that it might spread smallpox. See Esparragosa’s warning to vaccinators in his 1815 instruction manual: “Inoculation with epidemic smallpox is absolutely forbidden by His Majesty in the royal vaccine ordinances; because of this and because this is an efficient method of spreading [smallpox], causing great harm to humanity, no one should attempt this procedure or a similar one, especially when the inefable preservativo (cowpox vaccine) can be found throughout the Audiencia.” ML, Método Sencillo y facil para el conocimiento y curación de las viruelas así de las que se presentan generalmente con un caracter inflamatorio como de las malignas (Nueva Guatemala: Oficina de D. Ignacio Beteta, 1815), 17. 12. The timeline for these events is well documented in multiple issues of the Gazeta de Guatemala. See especially the issues that roughly cover the 1802–4 efforts to bring live cowpox vaccine to the Audiencia. See also Martínez Durán, Las Ciencias Médicas en Guatemala; and Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la Vacuna.’ ” Note that Smith’s piece includes Mexico’s experience as well. 13. “Viruelas,” Gazeta de Guatemala. 14. Ibid., 144. 15. Gazeta de Guatemala, June 25, 1804, 337. 16. The subscription campaign raised a total of 610 pesos. Individual donations ranged from 10 pesos from Don Manuel Palacios to 100 pesos from the Marqués de Aycinena. 17. See “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 7, 1802, 135–37. 18. This special mail ser vice was called un correo extraordinario. 19. Other cities searched for and acquired cowpox samples too, including the United States, part of larger transatlantic exchange networks of fluído vacuno, and reported on in the Gazeta de Guatemala. For example, U.S. president Thomas Jefferson sent “a small sample of the vaccine material” to a medical doctor in Philadelphia. Jefferson himself had received the vaccine sample from a Dr. Waterhouse in Cambridge, England. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 20, 1802, 229. This information was excerpted from the referred-to English language compendium, parts of which an unnamed person translated into Spanish, titled Idea concisa de los hechos mas importantes que hasta ahora se han dado luz sobre el descrubrimiento Jenneriano by C. R. Aikin, Royal College of Surgeons, London. No further publication information was provided except to note that this was the “second American edition.” 20. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 26, 1802, 188. 21. See “Noticias de Diciembre,” Gazeta de Guatemala, January 31, 1803, second entry, 5: “The same shipment from Oaxaca that arrived the night of the 16th [of January] included the vaccine fluid sent from Madrid to Sr. Oidor D. Jacobo de Villa Urrutia. Immediately Dr. Esparragosa vaccinated one of his [Villa Urrutia’s] sons, and three children of the Contador de Cuentas Tomás Wading, and others. But the vaccine did not produce any effect; the fluid had degraded in transit, the same thing that happened to the previous fluid that came from New Orleans by way of Vera Cruz.” 22. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 7, 1802, 135–37. Other contributors to this effort to obtain cowpox from Mexico included Jacobo de Villa Urrutia and Tomás Wading. Degraded or inert cowpox vaccine was described as inerte, pasado, or desvirtuado. The title of the works sent from Mexico to Guatemala were listed respectively

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in the Gazeta as Breve instrucción sobre la vacuna, medios de comunicarla, y observaciones de sus efectos, publicadas por una junta de médicos establecida en Paris, con el fin de propagar este preservativo de las viruelas (no further publication information given); and Primer informe dirigido a la sociedad de medicina de Paris por su comisión establecida en el Louvre sobre la inoculación de la vacuna (Madrid, 1801). 23. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 7, 1802, 135; “Vacuna,” June  14, 1802, 145. 24. Gazeta de Guatemala, June 21, 1802, 147; July 5, 1802, 161–65. For other such teaching/public education-focused essays, see “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 12, 1802, 176; “Vacuna. De sus progresos,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 27, 1802, 239–41. The Gazeta also published findings from international scientific societies and other learned scientists and physicians not only from the Americas and Europe, but also from Asia and the Middle East. For example, the newspaper reported on how in China doctors there vaccinated with cowpox through the nose; see “Vacuna: De la vacuna casual, comunicada a la especie humana,” Gazeta de Guatemala, October 18, 1802, 263–66. The Gazeta additionally reported that the vaccination had recently been approved and used in England, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Spain. 25. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 26, 1802, 188. 26. “Viruelas,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 14, 1802, 144–45. I judge semilla here to be human smallpox lymph because they use the verb “empapar” to describe how the cotton material must be drenched. This means that the smallpox material was not dry like scabs would be; scabs are also contagious and can spread smallpox. For an analysis of the use of smallpox scabs as an early form of biological warfare in colonial America, see Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth- Century North America: Beyond Jeffrey Amherst,” Journal of American History 86:4 (March 2000): 1552–80. 27. The French manual, in Spanish translation, is quoted in “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 5, 1802, 161–65; the reanimation directions are found on 164. The method of storing vaccine fluid dried between two pieces of glass continued to be used for decades to come in Central America and Mexico. See for example University of Arizona Special Collections (hereafter UAZSC), RC183.55.M4  S3, Francisco de Sandoval, Método de usar el virus seco de la vacuna conservado entre cristales (Chihuahua, Imprenta del Gobierno dirijida por Cayetano Ramos, 1841). 28. Later, during the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition for example, vacuna fluid was sealed in a pneumatic machine carried aboard ship. 29. “Viruelas,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 14, 1802, 144. 30. Ibid., 145. 31. Ibid. The sources do not indicate exactly when the search for cowpox among Guatemala’s cattle herds that the Protomedicato referred to had begun, or when interested parties started experimenting on animals with smallpox. 32. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 23–24. 33. “Vacuna: De la vacuna casual, comunicada a la especie humana,” Gazeta de Guatemala, October 18, 1802, 263. 34. Ibid., 265. 35. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 5, 1802, 246. 36. Ibid., 247. 37. Ibid., 247.

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Notes to Pages 171–173

38. Ibid. 39. “Con respecto a la circunstancia de dar menos leche, acaso puede en parte consistir en el dolor que se cause al animal quando se anda en las mamílas [sic? mamales?], por que la vaca tiene un dominio voluntario sobre su leche en quanto a dar mayor or menor porcion de cada vez. Es un hecho bien conocido en los grandes corrales de vacas, que la persona que tiene suave la mano para ordeñar saca mas leche de la misma ubre que quien la tiene áspera.” “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 5, 1802, 247. 40. Aikin, Idea concisa de los hechos mas importantes que hasta ahora se han dado luz sobre el descrubrimiento Jenneriano; excerpt published in the “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 20, 1802, 229–31. 41. Ibid., 230. 42. Ibid., 231. 43. Ibid. 44. Modern science has identified many kinds of related pox diseases in addition to humans and cows, including monkey pox, buffalo pox, and vole pox. 45. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 20, 1802, 230–31. 46. AGI, Indiferente General, 1558H, 330v. This excerpt comes from a report that Flores wrote supporting the idea of a royal vaccination expedition and offering a plan for the expedition. Flores established his credentials at the beginning of the letter in part by writing about Guatemala’s history in smallpox inoculation, and after the development of the Jenner vaccine in 1796, via searches for cowpox among the Audiencia’s cattle herds. His historical narrative allows me to place the beginning of animal experiments and inspections before the 1802 outbreak. 47. Ibid. Flores also wrote, “Cow inspections continued; the inoculation of ewes was repeated.” 48. “Vacuna. De sus progresos,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 27, 1802, 241. 49. This phrase was used to refer to the search for cowpox for vaccination; see AGCA A1–6108–55974, carta de Juan de Molina al Prudencio de Cozar (February 11, 1804), np. To date, I have not been able to find in the archive any sort of official directive from the Protomedicato or the Audiencia on the details of the Proyecto. 50. Beef was a highly a regulated animal food product in the Audiencia. For more on the regulation of the slaughter of cattle and sales of beef in colonial Guatemala, see Martha Few, “ ‘El daño que padece el bien común’: Casta revendedoras y los conflictos por la venta de carne en Guatemala Colonial, 1650–1730,” Mesoamérica 49 (2007): 1–24. 51. “Viruelas,” Gazeta de Guatemala, June 14, 1802, 145. 52. Aycinena was also one of the major contributors to the Protomedicato fund to obtain vacuna samples from abroad. 53. AGCA A1.4–49–241247, méritos y servicios de Doctor Don Toribio de Carbajal (1806), f. 3. Carbajal provided no further information on whether he inoculated humans or animals or both with the pus, nor does he say anything of the outcome. Today, Fraijanes refers to municipio in the Department of Guatemala, and encompasses the towns of Santa Catarina Pinula, San José Pinula, Barbarena, and Santa Cruz Naranjo. Gall, Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala, 123. 54. For reference to the many debts Molina owed, the hard times that the he, his wife and children faced, and his request for free housing from the alcalde mayor until

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he got those debts in order, see AGCA A1–6108–55974, carta de Juan de Molina, San Antonio Lacal, al Prudencio de Cozar (February 11, 1804), n.p. See the letter’s postscript for Molina’s assertion that Protomédico José Flores had taught him how to inoculate against smallpox. 55. AGCA A1–6108–55975, carta de Juan de Molina al Prudencio de Cozar, Malacatán (January 5, 1804), n.p. 56. Ibid. The letters suggest that the sitio was located near the town of Malacatán; that is where, it seems, Molina was based, and from where he sent his correspondence to Cozar. 57. Ibid. 58. González referred to it in his letter as “sobre haverse encontrado en las bacas de D. Juan Molina la viruela que se ha solicitado para la vacunación.” AGCA A1.24– 6091–55306, carta del Presidente de la Audiencia de Guatemala al alcalde mayor de Totonicapán (January 10, 1804), f. 7–8. 59. “Aun que no han acavado de madurar, o de declarar la podre, pero las remito para que vea Vmd si se puede hazer alguna experiencia.” AGCA A1–6108–55974, carta de Juan de Molina, San Antonio Lacal, al Prudencio de Cozar (February 11, 1804), n.p. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. “Y si uere del agrado de Vmd que yo haga algunos experimentos, siguiendome por una instrucción que tengo de inocular, echa por el Dr. Flores, me consederá su licencia para haver la operacion en un muchacho.” 62. Ibid. Mariano Larrave (1777–?) not only was a licensed medical doctor, he was also a journalist, alcalde, and signer of the Acta de Independencia (1821). Diccionario histórico biográfico, 549. 63. Modern medicine has classified anthrax as a bacterial disease. According to the CDC, “ today anthrax is most common in agricultural regions of Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, central and southwestern Asia, southern and eastern Europe, and the Caribbean.” “Anthrax,” Centers for Disease Control, accessed September 29, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/anthrax / basics/index.html. 64. In Germany and Austria, it was known as ragpickers disease. For a case study of a mid-nineteenth-century anthrax outbreak in the United States, see A. Macher, “An Industry-Related Outbreak of Human Anthrax: Massachusetts, 1868,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:10 (October 2002), accessed September 29, 2013, http://wwwnc.cdc.gov. For causes and cures of anthrax today, as well as its development and use as a biological weapon, see the CDC anthrax page, http://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/ basics/index.html. 65. David M. Morens, “Epidemic Anthrax in the Eighteenth Century, the Americas,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:10 (October 2002), accessed September 29, 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid0810.020173. 66. Gazeta de Guatemala, May 16, 1803, 217. 67. Méthodo de la inoculación de las viruelas, 4. The servant is not named in the source. 68. Gazeta de Guatemala, June 25, 1804, 340. 69. AGCA A1–6108–55975, carta de Juan de Molina a Prudencio de Cozar, Malacatán (January 5, 1804), n.p. 70. On the use of orphans and cows with cowpox during the expedition, see for example AGCA A1.4.7–2214–15859, “Expediente sobre la inoculación de la viruela con el flúido de vacuno” (1804), n.p. This strategy was originally proposed by José

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Flores in his report to the Crown in AGI, Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores, Madrid (February 28, 1803), f. 331; for bringing cowpox-infected cattle and orphans for arm-to-arm vaccine transmission on the Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition, see AGCA A1.4.7–2214–15859 (1804). 71. AGCA A1–6098–55547, f. 14. 72. For conflicts over animal experiments and vivisection in Europe at this time, see Charles T. Wolfe, “Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013), 255–82. 73. “Vacuna,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 20, 1802, 229–31. 74. AGI, Indiferente General, 1558H. 75. “Dr. Cairo” is likely an alias. Gazeta de Guatemala, April 9, 1804, 38. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. For a description of Jenner’s test, see Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variola Vaccinae. 78. “Vacuna (N. 370),” Gazeta de Guatemala, November 5, 1804, 496. 79. Ibid., 495. 80. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A. 81. Ibid., 23–24. 82. Ibid., 24–25. 83. Ibid., 23–24. The season for pustule sickness in the Audiencia’s cattle is not described. 84. Ibid., 24. Here it is not clear if “las viruelas” refers to cowpox or smallpox in sheep. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 26. 87. Gazeta de Guatemala, June 25, 1804, 339. 88. Gazeta de Guatemala, May 28, 1804, 112; June 25, 1804, 339. The children were all referred to with titles of Don or Doña: Alfonso Wading, son of the Contador Decano del Tribunal de Cuentas; Eulogio Villa Urrutia, son of the Oidordecano de la Real Audiencia; Francisco Rivera, son of the Administrador General de Alcabalas; Magdalena Sosa, Dolores Valenzuela; and Vicente Salazar. 89. Gazeta de Guatemala, May 28, 1804, 112. 90. Gazeta de Guatemala, June 25, 1804, 340. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 342. 93. Ibid., 343. 94. Esparragosa called it “un grano de verdadera vacuna.” “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 2, 1804, 345. Smith notes that in May 1804 the Protomedicato began plans for a mission to Cuba to obtain vaccine, led by doctor Vicente Carranza and Ramón Portillo, practicante mayor in Nueva Guatemala’s Royal Hospital, that included six nonimmune boys. The idea was to vaccinate boys and bring them back to Guatemala to continue the vaccination chain there. Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la vacuna,’ ” 20–21. 95. All the information in this paragraph comes from “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 2, 1804, 345–50. 96. All of the information in this paragraph comes from AGCA A1–2818–24919, f.  1–2; and “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 2, 1804, 345–50.

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97. The Gazeta reported that Castriciones transferred the vaccine and boys to medical doctor Nicolás Monteros, who then vaccinated 9,220 people. See Gazeta de Guatemala, October 29, 1804, 487–88. 98. Ibid., 488. The Gazeta did not provide a first name for the medical doctor Quiñones. 99. AGI, Indiferente General 1558 I, f. 2–4, Narciso Esparragosa a la Junta Central, Guatemala (November 15, 1806), cited in Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la vacuna,’ ” 53. 100. The details in this paragraph come from AGCA A1.4.6–4026–31011, carta del Presidente de la Audiencia Antonio González al Protomédico José Antonio Córdova (November 9, 1804), n.p.; and AGCA A1.4–4027–31012, carta de Francisco Xavier de Balmis al Presidente de Guatemala, Merída de Yucatán (July 3, 1804), n.p., copy, November 9, 1804. Note that this is a copy of the letter that Pastor brought with him and presented to the president of the Audiencia and is dated the day after his arrival in the capital. 101. Balmis wrote to Guatemala’s president, “During the journey, I have performed arm-to-arm vaccination along the way, which is the only efficient and safe method to maintain the precious vaccine fluid.” AGCA A1.4–4027–31012. 102. AGCA A1.4.6–4026–31011. 103. AGCA A1.4–4027–31012. George Lovell notes that Pastor passed through Totonicapán on November 4, 1804, and that according to Gobernador Prudencio de Cozar, he did not leave a sample of the vaccine. Lovell, “Las enfermedades del Viejo Mundo y la mortandad indígena,” 266. I have not been able to locate any documents written by Pastor himself about his travels to, and experiences in, the Audiencia of Guatemala. Michael Smith writes, “Pastor left no record of his activities during his apparently extensive stay in Guatemala. He did not rejoin Balmis in Mexico City until January 3, 1805.” Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la vacuna,’ ” 54. 104. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A. The junta’s meeting minutes for the next few years can be found in AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860, “Libro de Actas de la Junta Central de Vacuna del Reyno de Guatemala.” 105. These members could be reelected. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A; AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860. 106. The intendant of Petén traveled to Verapaz to get the vaccine. 107. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (April 3, 1805), f. 3–4; for Celis, see the minutes from the April 17, 1805, meeting (4v). 108. Gazeta de Guatemala, October 29, 1804, 486–87; Smith, “The ‘Real Expedición Marítima de la vacuna,’ ” 54. 109. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (April 3, 1805), f. 3. 110. Esparragosa eventually formally took over the position of protomédico. The archbishop also had to step down from the committee because he was losing his sight. A1.4.9–2214–15860 (March 22, 1805), f. 1–2. 111. “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 2, 1804, 346. 112. Ibid. 113. AGCA A1–2818–24919, f. 1. 114. “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 2, 1804, 346–47. 115. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 20 1806), f. 39. González was described as a girl (niña) in a later entry where the Committee revisited her case in AGCA

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Notes to Pages 182–186

A1.4.9–2214–15860 (November 24,) f. 43v. For more on similarities among miraculous healing accounts, see Few, “ ‘Our Lord Entered His Body,’ ” 114–24. 116. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 20, 1806), f. 39; (November 24, 1806), f. 43v. 117. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, f. 23, law 92. 118. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 20, 1806), 39. 119. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (November  24, 1806), f. 43v. This same entry describes González’s blindness as caused by clouds or nuves. 120. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860, Acta No. 41 (June 9, 1806), f. 33v–34. In the colonial period, leprosy was known as mal lazarino. 121. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, f. 24, law 91. 122. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, f. 24, law 90. 123. “La terrible epizootia llamada peste o epidemia.” AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 24, law 88. It is unclear exactly to what disease this referred. 124. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 16. 125. Ibid. 126. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (May 8, 1805), f. 6v–7. 127. Such vaccination acts in rural pueblos were described in the official vaccination laws as solemnidades. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 19. As we have seen with the earlier inoculation campaigns in the 1780s and 90s, priests were present for those as well, so this formal role can be seen as an extension of those earlier responsibilities. 128. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A. 129. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860, (June 26, 1805). 130. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (November 6, 1805). 131. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (November 6, 1805). 132. Members of the provincial juntas included the bishop, governor, an ecclesiastical council member, a secretary, and a medical doctor (if available). Note that Comayagua at that time did not have a city council, so in that case they could elect a wealthy elite resident to serve at that post. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 7–8. Other areas impor tant to vaccination campaigns had vaccine councils as well, organized by category: settlements without city councils and few or no “Spanish residents” (such as San Salvador, Costa Rica, Sosonate, and Quetzaltenango); smaller settlements with city councils and “Spaniards” (such as San Miguel, San Vicente, Santa Ana, Tegucigalpa, Nicaragua, and a few others) who worked under the orders of the provincial council; and provinces without city councils (such as Chiquimula, Verapaz, Sacatapéques [elsewhere called Amatitanes y Sacatepéquez], Escuintla, Chimaltenango, Sololá, Totonicapán, and Suchitepéquez). 133. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860, (May 12, 1806), f. 33. 134. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 20, 1806), f. 38v–39. 135. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (November 10, 1806), f. 41v–42. 136. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 20, 1806), f. 39. 137. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 24, law 89. 138. Ibid. 139. AGCA A1.4–4027–31012. 140. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (May 22, 1805), f. 7v–8. 141. “Miscelanea Petenera,” Gazeta de Guatemala, September 24, 1804, 445. Note that this is the same Domingo Fajardo who wrote to the Gazeta about the four postmortem cesareans carried out there.

Notes to Pages 186–190

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142. Ibid., 143. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 30, 1805), f. 18. 144. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 2, 1805), f. 28. 145. Esparragosa Papers, Document 60, carta de Antonio Alexandro de Acuña, Omoa (November 17, 1815), n.p. 146. Esparragosa Papers, Document 58, carta de Antonio Alexandro de Acuña, Omoa (June 3, 1815), n.p. 147. Ibid.; and Esparragosa Papers, Document 59, carta de Antonio Alexandro Acuña, Omoa (September 19, 1815), n.p. 148. “De la vacuna en Guatemala,” Gazeta de Guatemala, July 2, 1804, 345. 149. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, 25. 150. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (June 26, 1805), f. 18. For Caseros’s salary, see June 9 1806, f. 33v. 151. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (August 7, 1805), f. 12v. 152. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (August 7, 1805), f. 12 153. Ibid., f. 12–12v. 154. Esparragosa Papers, Document 46, carta de Manuel del Sol a Narciso Esparragosa (October 16, 1815), n.p. 155. José Antonio de Córdova, Cartilla que enseña el modo de vacunar y distinguir la verdadera y falsa vacuna ([Nueva] Guatemala: [s.n.], 1804), n.p. This quote is located on the last page of the handbook. 156. AGI, Indiferente General 1558A, especially 21. 157. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 2, 1805), f. 28–29. 158. Gazeta de Guatemala, November 5, 1804, 495–96. 159. AGI, Indifferente General 1558I, f. 2–4. 160. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (January 15, 1806), f. 24v–25. 161. Gall, Diccionario Geográfico, 2:423. 162. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (May 22, 1805), f. 8v. 163. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (June 26, 1805), f. 10v. 164. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (October 9, 1805), f. 17. 165. Gall, Diccionario Geográfico, 2:857. 166. “Vacuna (N. 370),” Gazeta de Guatemala, November 5, 1804, 495. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid., 496. 169. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (April 14, 1806), f. 29–29v; see also the entry for April 10, 1806, f. 28v. 170. Ibid. 171. AGCA A1.4.9–2214–15860 (August 11, 1806), f. 36. This incident was reported by the Junta Provincial de Suchitepéquez to the Central Junta. 172. Ibid., f. 36–36v. 173. Esparragosa Papers, Document 99, carta de Narciso Esparragosa a Mariano Larrave (incompleta) (November 1, 1814), n.p. 174. Esparragosa Papers, Document 100, carta de Narciso Esparragosa a Ignacio Ruiz de Zevallos, n.p. 175. Ibid. 176. Esparragosa Papers, Document 67, carta de Mariano José Suarez a Narciso Esparragosa (March 28, 1815), n.p.

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Notes to Pages 190–192

177. Esparragosa Papers, Document 71, carta de Mariano José Suarez a Narciso Esparragosa, Tuxtla (January 30, 1818), n.p. 178. AGI Guatemala 620, “Indios de Fraijanes,” 1805. Tira 34, carta de D. Andrés Saavedra y Alfaro, alcalde mayor of the Provincias de Amatitanes y Sacatepéquez al Rey, Antigua Guatemala (January 30, 1805). 179. Esparragosa Papers, Document 28, carta de José Equizaval a Narciso Esparragosa (December 29, 1815), n.p. 180. Esparragosa Papers, Document 21, carta de [Pablo] José Guzmán, Escuintla (May 22, 1815), n.p. 181. Esparragosa Papers, Document 57, carta de Santos Cazeros a Narciso Esparragosa, Santa María (October 28, 1815), n.p. 182. Esparragosa Papers, Document 23, nota de Narciso Esparragosa (August 7, 1815), n.p. 183. AGCA A1–192–3920, “Expediente contra los alcaldes y principales del pueblo de Chiquimula por la decidio la resistencia que hicieron a las superiores ordenes en punto de viruelas” (1802). Chiquimula was primarily a K’iche’ Maya pueblo; see Gall, Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala, 3:621–23. 184. Thank you to Owen Jones, who graciously helped me with the transcription conventions for colonial Maya names and terms. 185. AGCA A1–192–3920, f. 12v. 186. Godinez also held the military title “sargento de milicias regladas” and schoolteacher (maestro de niños). While Gertrudis Godinez’s exact relationship to José Antonio is not given in the sources, it is likely that she is his wife. This the only explicit reference to family members accompanying medical campaign personnel that I located in the archives. 187. Gertrudis Godinez’s signature can be found twice on two separate reports submitted by her husband to colonial officials. See AGCA A1–192–3920, f. 10v, 16. 188. AGCA A1–192–3920, 3 May 1802, especially f. 2v–3. 189. Roy Porter, “The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below,” Theory and Society 14:2 (March 1985): 175–98. 190. AGCA A1–192–3920. Aguirre described his illness as “la reuma he[ricipela]” (f. 1–1v) and “los dolores reumáticos y erisipela,” Gueguetenango (May 11, 1802), f. 5v. We know today that erysipelas is a bacterial infection of the skin. 191. AGCA A1–192–3920 (May 3, 1802), f. 3v. This village is also sometimes spelled “Sacaha” in the sources. 192. AGCA A1–192–3920, carta de Don Gerónimo Tarazena a Francisco Xavier de Aguirre, Sacaja (May 8, 1802), f. 3–3v. 193. Aguirre felt the situation so dire when he received word that another infant had come down with smallpox, he threatened to go himself despite his illness, even if he had to be carried in a chair (“en silla de manos”). AGCA A1–192–3920, carta de Francisco Xavier de Aguirre a Francisco Sebastián Chamorro, Gueguetenango (May 11, 1802), f. 5v. 194. AGCA A1–192–3920, (May 3, 1802), f. 2v–3. 195. AGCA A1–192–3920, carta de Francisco Sebastián Chamorro a Francisco Xavier de Aguirre, (May 12, 1802), f. 7v. 196. AGCA A1–192–3920, report from Francisco Sebastián Chamorro (May 17, 1802), f. 8v–9. From Momostenango, Chamorro not only continued to negotiate with

Notes to Pages 193–200

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Chiquimula leaders, he traveled to inspect Sacaja, San Francisco El Alto, and other towns in the area that had reported outbreaks of smallpox and typhus-like putrid fevers. 197. Ibid., f. 9v. 198. AGCA A1–192–3920, carta de José Antonio Godinez, Santa Maria Chiquimula (May 20, 1802), f. 14–14v. 199. Ibid. 200. Ibid., f. 14v. 201. AGCA A1–192–3920, “Escrito original de los yndios de Sn Antonio Ylotenango para el MY Sr. Presidente sobre haver recogido perdidas en sus montes 57 criaturas de Chiquimula” (July 20, 18[02]), f. 36. The children were found on July 18; it is not clear how long they remained lost. 202. Ibid., f. 35–36v. 203. AGCA, A1.21.2–158–3200, “Lista de las 57 criaturas que el 12 de agosto por la tarde trageros los justicias de San Antonio Ylotenango jurisdiccion de Solola, y distante 4 leguas de Chiquimula las que recogieron el 18 de julio de los montes,” f. 37. 204. AGCA, A1.21.2–158–3200, “Sobre cuento motín que cauzaron los yndios del pueblo Santiago Sacatepéquez,” Sacatepéquez (1800), f. 1. The priest is not named in the source. 205. Ibid., f. 19v–20. In another section of this source, this man is identified as Chinoy’s son-in-law. 206. Ibid., f. 19v. 207. Ibid. 208. Ibid., f. 10–10v. 209. Ibid., f. 10. 210. Ibid. 211. Ibid., f. 10v–11. 212. Ibid. 213. Ibid., f. 11.

Conclusion 1. Comments from Kevin Gosner, Keisuke Hirano, Laura Matthew, and the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript were instrumental in shaping this chapter. 2. “Una profunda melancolia meditaba,” AGI Indiferente General 1558H, carta de José Flores al Consejo de Indias (February 28, 1803), f. 327. 3. This biographical information on Molina comes from Diccionario histórico biográfico de Guatemala, 630. 4. Ibid., 549. 5. The capitalization of “Patriotismo” is in the original source. AGCA A1.4–4027– 31033, carta de los alcaldes ordinarios de esta ciudad de Cartago al ayuntamiento de la capital de Guatemala, Cartago (June 5, 1815), n.p. 6. I found James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) helpful in thinking through these issues.

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Notes to Page 201

7. Henry Dunn, Guatimala, or, the United Provinces of Central America, in 1827– 8; Being Sketches and Memorandums Made During a Twelve Months’ Residence in That Republic (New York: G&C Carvill, 1828), 154–55. 8. Jeremy Greene et. al., “Colonial Medicine and Its Legacies,” in Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction, edited by Paul Farmer et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 33.

Bibliography

Archives, Research Libraries Consulted Guatemala Archivo General de Centro América, Guatemala City (AGCA) Biblioteca Nacional, Guatemala City (BN) Museo del Libro, Antigua (ML)

Spain Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla (AGI)

Mexico Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (AGN) Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City (MNA)

England Wellcome Library, London

United States Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin Countway Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Bibliography

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Huntington Library, Huntington, California John Car ter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island John Tate Lanning Papers, University of Missouri, St. Louis Newberry Library, Chicago Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson, Arizona Tozzer Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Private Papers Esparragosa Papers, private collection The AGCA typically includes folio numbers on the top right hand corner of the documents housed there. When an AGCA document, or any other source used in this study does not have that numbering, I note this with n.p. (not paginated). Where possible, I include other identifying information. The exception is sources from the AGI, which typically do not have folio numbers on documents. In this case I dispensed with n.p., and I identify the documents such as letters by to-from, place written, and date. When I quote directly from sources in Spanish in this book’s main text, I have updated the spelling to reflect current conventions. When I quote directly from sources in the endnotes, I have left the quotes with their original spellings, lack of accents and punctuation, and abbreviations. Finally, I use the orthography of the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala (http://www.almg.org.gt). In quotes from manuscript sources or books published before this transition to the new orthography, I have left the original spelling except where noted. In the case of book titles that use the older orthography I have retained the spelling in the original.

Selected Bibliography of Published Sources Achim, Miruna. Lagartijas medicinales: Remedios americanos y debates científicos en la Ilustración. Mexico, DF: Consejo Nacional para La Cultura y Las Artes, 2008. Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo,  D.  W. Stahle,  M.  D. Therrell, and  S.  G. Chavez. “Drought, Epidemic Disease, and the Fall of Classic Period Cultures in Mesoamerica (AD 750–950): Hemorrhagic Fevers as a Cause of Massive Population Loss.” Medical Hypotheses 65:2 (2005): 405–9. Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo, D. W. Stahle, M. D. Therrell, R. D. Griffin, and M. K. Cleaveland . “When Half of the Population Died: The Epidemic of Hemorrhagic Fevers of 1576 in Mexico.” FEMS Microbiology Letters 240 (2004): 1–5. Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo, D. W. Stahle, M. K. Cleaveland, and M. D. Therrell. “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:4 (April 2002): 360–62. Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

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Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. El negro esclavo en Nueva España: La formación colonial, la medicina popular, y otros ensayos. Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994. Alchon, Suzanne Austin. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Alcorn, Janis B. Huastec Mayan Ethnobotany. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984. Anderson, Warwick. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth- Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Asturias, Francisco. Historia de la medicina en Guatemala. Guatemala, CA: Editorial Universitaria, 1958. Aznar López, José. El doctor don José de Flores: Una vida al servicio de la ciencia. Guatemala, CA: Editorial Universitaria, 1960. Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Barrera- Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Birn, Anne-Emmanuelle. “Small(pox) Success?,” Ciência e saúde coletiva 16:2 (2011): 591–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1413 - 81232011000200022. Bleichmar, Daniela, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Borhegyi, Stephen F. de. “The Cult of Our Lord of Esquipulas in Middle America and New Mexico.” El Palacio 61 (1954): 387–401. Brading, David. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Brady, James E., and Keith M. Prufer, eds. In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Brady, James E., and Pierre R. Colas. “Nikte’ Mo’ Scattered Fire in the Cave of K’ab Chante.” In Stone Houses and Earth Lords: Maya Religion in the Cave Context, edited by Keith M. Prufer and James E. Brady, 149–66. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. Brinton, Daniel G. “Nagualism: A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 33:144 (February  14, 1894): 11–73. Bristol, Joan. Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Brotons, Navarro, ed. Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution / Más alla de la Leyenda Negra: España y la Revolución Científica. Valencia, Spain: Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia, 2007. Broussard, Ray F. “Description of Atitlán and Its Dependencies, 1585: A Translation with Introduction and Notes.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1952. Brown, Richmond F. Juan Fermín de Aycinena: Central American Colonial Entrepreneur, 1729–1796. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Butler, Sara M. “Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenthand Fourteenth- Century England.” Journal of Women’s History 17:4 (Winter 2005): 9–31.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abello, Francisco, 89–93, 234nn182–83 abortion, modern debates on, 99, 237n9 Acosta, Juan de, 188 Acuña, Antonio de, 187 adoratorios, 65, 79–83 African medical cultures, 209n47, 213n8 agricultural ceremonies, 81 Aguilera, Juana María, 75 Aguirre, Francisco Xavier de: in antityphus campaigns, 72–75, 89; and Indian sacred spaces, 79–80, 82–84, 86–88; on resistance to antityphus campaigns, 92–95, 236n219; on resistance to smallpox vaccine, 192, 193; title of, 227n68 Ahcot, Pedro, 77 Alcayaga, Jacobo de, 35, 36 Alcorn, Janis, 108–9 Alférez, Andrés, 46 allochrony, 19 alms, 35, 54, 58, 156 Alvarado, Diego, 235n205 Alvarado, Pedro, 189–90 Anderson, Warwick, 17 animal(s): in divination, 38; fetuses resembling, 108; graves dug up by, 66,

225n21; in shape shifting, 104–7; smallpox vaccine given to, 183; in sorcery, 105–7; in typhus epidemics, 66, 224n19, 225n21. See also specific types animal experimentation: by Flores, 136; with postmortem cesareans, 102–3, 176; with smallpox vaccine, 166, 170–78 anthrax, 175, 259nn63–64 antiepidemic campaigns: coercion in, 53; cooperation of political and religious figures in, 48; funding sources for, 48–49; medical doctors in, first use of, 48; religion in, 22–23. See also specific diseases aparatos erisipelatosis, 157–58, 253n138 Apologética historia sumaria (Casas), 146–47 apparitions, 39–44, 217n64, 218n78 Argueta, Estanislao, 74 Aristotle, 110, 242n72 Arrese, Pedro, 101–2, 108, 111, 125, 239n30 Arriola, Agustín, 192, 265n193 atole, 156, 253n132

279

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Audiencia of Guatemala: army officers vs. lawyers as presidents of, 138; geographic region of, 3–4, 6; vs. kingdom of Guatemala, 100, 238n19; postmortem cesareans mandated by, 22, 97–100, 132, 153, 237n13, 252n117; responses to epidemic death, 31–36. See also specific diseases Aurora de Havana, La (newspaper), 173 Ávalos y Porras, Manuel, 49–53, 56, 220n128, 222n170 Aycinena, Juan Fermín de, 140, 173, 248n42, 256n16, 259n52 Aznar López, José, 222n173 Bacu (adoratorio), 80–82 bad air, 66–67 Bailón, Pascual (saint), 41–44, 218n89 Balmis, Francisco Xavier, 11, 18, 203n1, 204n8, 205n16, 256n9, 261n101 baptism, fetal: biological matter in, 111–12; Fajardo’s accounts of, 117–19; in manuals, 102, 103, 108, 110; after miscarriages, 108, 110, 112, 153; vs. newborn baptism, 109–10; of slaves, 130; universality of, 98 barbers, postmortem cesareans by, 97, 102–3, 117–18 baths, thermal, 68–71. See also hot springs; temascales Bausello, José, 128–29 beetles, 59, 74, 145–46 Benedict IV (pope), 101 birth rituals, Indian, 81, 109–10. See also baptism black medical cultures, 209n47, 213n8 bleeding therapies: Indian vs. Spanish, 15–16, 90, 147, 148; ritual significance of, 146–47; salaries paid for, 228n80; and smallpox inoculation, 144–48, 155; for typhus, 71–72, 74, 77, 89–90; wet vs. dry cupping, 72, 227n66 blindness, 142, 182 blood, ritual significance of, 146–47 Bolinaga, Vicente, 73, 82, 92 Brinton, Daniel, 229n99 Bueda, Manuel, 83–84, 232n150

Index

Bueno, Cosme, 55 Buffon, comte de, 22, 212n73 burials: dug up by animals, 66, 225n21; resistance to changes in practices for, 90–92; shortages of space for, 34–36; smell from, 66–67; after wakes, 47 calpules, 87 Camposeco, Juan, 82 Camposeco y Lorenzana, José, 137, 158, 159, 161 Cangiamila, Francesco, 101, 102, 103, 113, 115, 238n22 Canó, Gaspar, 77 Carbajal, Toribio José, 57, 75, 173, 222n178, 237n13, 259n53 Carbonel, Antonio, 10 Carillo, Martha de, 39, 216n52 Carlos IV (king of Spain), 3 Carmona, José, 46 Carpio, Bartolo, 46 Carranza, Vicente: in antityphus campaigns, 73–75, 89–93, 235nn207– 8; salary of, 228n79; and smallpox vaccine, 186, 188, 256n10, 261n94 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 146–47 Caseros, Santos Truxillo, 184–85, 191 Castriciones, Gregorio, 180, 261n97 Castro, Antonio, 191 Castro, Juana, 193 Castro, Miguel, 193 cattle: anthrax in, 175; regulation of, 259n50. See also cowpox Cattle Project, 173, 176, 258n49 caves, sacred, 79–88, 83, 85 Celos, Santiago, 181 censuses: expansion of state reach through, 200; after smallpox epidemics, 157–58; of smallpox vaccination, 183–85; after typhus epidemics, 81 center-periphery paradigm, 7–8 Central Vaccine Junta, 177–78, 180–89 cesareans, postmortem, 26, 96–132; colonial views on fetuses and, 109–15; elites’ role in establishing, 98, 99–104; Fajardo’s accounts of, 116–19; and

Index

fetuses as colonial subjects, 97–98, 99, 100, 104, 116; humanitarianism in, 100–104, 111; Indian men performing, 97, 117–18; Indian views on fetuses and, 104–10; mandate on, 22, 97–100, 132, 153, 237n13, 252n117; manuals on, 101–3, 108, 111, 113–15, 176, 240nn32–33, 240n41; and miscarriages caused by violence, 121–32, 243n95; religious motives for, 22, 99–102; resistance to, 115; and slave pregnancies, 129–30; after smallpox deaths, 153–54; tests to ensure maternal death before, 100, 238n17. See also baptism Chamorro, Francisco (father), 138, 248n27 Chamorro, Francisco (son): career of, 138–39, 247n26, 255n174; on Indian reactions to smallpox inoculation, 20, 145, 146–47, 158–59, 162–63, 250n74, 251n99; on outcomes of smallpox epidemic, 157–63, 254n170; and resistance to smallpox vaccine, 192–93; in smallpox inoculation, 142, 145–52, 252n107, 255n174; in smallpox quarantine, 137–40 Charles III (king of Spain), 101, 249n42 Charles IV (king of Spain), 98, 99–100 Chatá, Dominga, 119 Chatá, Nicolasa, 97, 102, 116–18, 236n6, 236n8 Chaves, Cornelio, 143 Chaves, Domingo, 95 Chiapas, smallpox in. See smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796 chickens, 156 children: baptism of, 109–10; birth rituals at adoratorios for, 81; mortality from smallpox, 4, 39–40, 204n6; mortality from typhus, 64; smallpox inoculation of, 59, 60, 144, 145, 149–51, 154–55, 250n71; as smallpox reservoirs, 176, 180, 185, 186, 261n94; smallpox vaccination censuses for, 183–84; smallpox vaccine tested on, 168, 176, 177, 179–80, 260n88; wakes for, 44–47

·

281

Chile, smallpox inoculation in, 222n166 Chinautla, 15, 210n49 Chinoy, Martín, 194, 195 Chiquimula: smallpox vaccine in, 191–93; typhus epidemic in, 74–75 cholera epidemics, 222n180 Chonay, Miguel, 72, 227n63, 227n65 Christianity: on fetal animation at conception, 101, 110–13; in humanitarianism, 23–24; Indians in spread of, 149; medical contributions and influence of, 21–24; in postmortem cesareans, 22, 99–102; in responses to mass epidemic death, 34–37; in smallpox vaccination, 181–82, 184. See also baptism; priests Chul, Antonio, 77 civil society, emergence of, 8–10, 207n26 Clarinero, Pedro, 241n46 clothing, Indian, 22 cocolmeca, 68, 225n32 coercion: in antiepidemic campaigns, 53; in humanitarianism, 199–200; in postmortem cesareans, 115; in smallpox inoculation, 144 Cogito, Pedro, 105 Collins, Anne Cox, 224n11 colonialism: colonial medicine reinforcing, 25–26; conquest period in, 29–31, 97 colonial medicine: circulation of knowledge in, 12–13, 19–20, 166; colonialism reinforced by, 25–26; Creole-peninsular divide in, lack of, 11; humanitarianism in, 10–11; interactions between Mesoamerican medicine and, 14–20; Mesoamerican knowledge used in, 18–20, 155–56; standardization in, 100, 238n20. See also Indian resistance; and specific diseases colonial officials, army officers vs. lawyers as, 138 colonial subjects: fetuses as, 97–98, 99, 100, 104, 116, 236n9; pathologization of, 24 Columbus, Christopher, 62

282 ·

Concepción: adoratorio outside, 79–83; typhus epidemics in, 64, 66, 76, 78, 79–82, 224n8, 225n21 conquest period: last independent Maya kingdom in, 97; mortality rates during, 29–31 Cook, David, 62–64, 224n4 copal, 47, 67, 86 Córdova, José Antonio de: postmortem cesarean manual by, 240n32; Protomedicato under, 167, 181, 256n10; in Royal Economic Society, 9; in smallpox vaccination, 12, 17–18, 167–68, 172, 179–80, 256n10 Córdova, Matías de, 21–22, 211n72 Cornelio, Maestro, 46 Coronado, Ignacio de, 58 Cortés, Hernán, 251n80 Cortés y Larraz, Pedro: on baptism of newborns, 109–10; on deer antlers, 86; Descripción geográfico-moral, 44; on Indian language ritual book, 40, 217n61; life and career of, 218n90; on measles outbreak of 1769, 47–49, 219n107; on population of Jacaltenango, 137; on purification rituals, 47; on wakes, 44, 45, 219n105 Costa Rica, smallpox vaccine in, 180, 181, 182–83 Cota, Francisco, 87 Cota, Sebastián, 87 Council of the Indies, 3–4 cowpox: immunity to smallpox through exposure to, 165; as “marvelous fluid,” 27, 165; presentation in cattle, 171–72; search for sources of, 170–75. See also smallpox vaccine Cozar, Prudencio: and Indian uprising in Nebaj, 94, 139; life and career of, 139, 248nn29–30; in search for cowpox, 174, 175; in smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796, 137–41, 143, 152 Creole nationalism, 11 Creole-peninsular divide, 9, 11 Creole Spaniards, definition of, 9 Crespona, Magdalena, 75

Index

Cresson, Frank M., Jr., 220n124 criminal cases, on miscarriages, 121–29 Cuba, smallpox vaccine in, 173, 261n94 Cuentas Zayas, Agustín de las, 133, 246nn1–2, 253n140 Culmi, 80–81, 231n128 Cuman, 80–81, 231n128 cumatz, 41–43 curandero sangrador, 15 cure, meaning of term, 50–51 death, divination of, 38–39, 42–43. See also epidemic death; mortality rates deer antlers, 86–87, 88 Deloria, Philip, 20 Derby, Lauren, 229n94 Descripción geográfico-moral (Cortés y Larraz), 44 Desplanquez, Francisco, 49–53, 56 De Vos, Paula, 212n83 Díaz, Bernal, 147, 251n80 Diego, Simón, 87 diet: in hospitals, 53–54; and Indian susceptibility to measles, 52; during smallpox infection, 155–56 divination, 37–38, 42–43, 77 doctors, medical: in campaign against measles, 48–54; in campaign against typhus, 73–79, 89–93; first use of, in antiepidemic campaign, 48; postcolonial political participation by, 198–99; postmortem cesarean manual by, 102, 240n32; salaries of, 228n79; shortage of licensed, 48; in smallpox vaccination, 167–70, 173–78. See also lay persons; and specific doctors dogs, rabid, 183 Domas y Alcalá, María Josefa, 10 Domas y Valle, José, 9, 10, 72–73, 136, 160, 162 duende, 90, 234n189 Dunn, Alvis, 234n185, 235n205 Dunn, Henry, 200–201 Durán, Narciso, 118 Durón, Valentín, 240n33 Dym, Jordana, 8, 208n38

Index

Earle, Rebecca, 207n26 earthquakes, 56 economy: of highlands, 133–34, 137; tributary Indians in, 25, 32–33 Editor Constitucional, El (newspaper), 198 elites, colonial: in emergence of civil society, 8–10; humanitarianism among, 10; intellectual lives of, 8–10; in postcolonial politics, 198–99; in postmortem cesareans, 98, 99–104; in Royal Economic Society, 9; in smallpox inoculation, 11, 55; smallpox vaccine sought by, 11–12, 165–68, 256n16; vision for role of medicine, 10–11, 61 elites, Indian: in campaign against measles, 53; in resistance to colonial medicine, 92; as ritual specialists, 40–41; in smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796, 159–60; women, 40–41 El Salvador, smallpox vaccine in, 180, 181, 184, 186, 261n97 Eneque, Palqual, 246n153 Enlightenment: elite embrace of, 9–10; Spanish term for, 208n30; vision for medicine in, 4–5, 10–11, 61 Enríquez de Guzmán, Enrique, 32, 214n12 entrada, 93 epidemic(s): difficulty of identifying diseases from records, 213n2; “virgin soil,” 30. See also antiepidemic campaigns; and specific diseases epidemic death, mass, 26, 29–61; colonial responses to, 31–37; during conquest period, 29–31; humanitarian responses to, 32–35, 198; Indian population decline from, 30–32; and introduction of smallpox inoculation, 55–61; in measles outbreak of 1769, 47–54; Mesoamerican responses to, 37–47; religious responses to, 34–37; towns depopulated by, 33. See also mortality rates Equizaval, José, 190–91 Escobar, Manuel José, 186

· 283

Esparragosa, Narciso: forceps invented by, 113–14; on miscarriage case, 122–24, 244n116, 244n118, 245n133; Protomedicato under, 181, 262n110; in Royal Economic Society, 9; in search for cowpox, 168; on smallpox inoculation, 256n11; smallpox vaccine administered by, 12, 179, 180, 257n21; in smallpox vaccine deployment, 186, 187, 188, 190–91; in smallpox vaccine junta, 256n10 Estachería, José de, 99, 100, 102, 132, 237n13 Estrada, José Santiago, 182 ethics, of human and animal experiments, 175–76 Excolin, Nicolás, 72, 227n67 Exvalam, Jerónimo, 77 Fabian, Johannes, 19 Fabry, Wilhelm, 240n41 Fajardo, Domingo, 116–19, 185–86, 263n141 families: in postmortem cesareans, 131; in typhus epidemics, 64, 65–66, 67; wakes held by, 44–47 Farmer, Paul, 221n150 fetuses, 26, 96–132; as animated at conception, 101, 110–13; as colonial subjects, 97–98, 99, 100, 104, 116, 236n9; colonial views on, 109–15; definition and use of term, 98–99; difference in ranking of, 116, 121–22; homicide of, 125–28; Indian views on, 104–10; of slaves, 129–30. See also baptism; cesareans; miscarriages Figueroa, Marta de la, 106, 241n52, 241n54 Figueroa, Vicente, 188 Flora española (Quer), 19 Flores, José: on cowpox, 165; on human suffering, 32–33, 198; indigenous knowledge used by, 18, 155; medical career and expertise of, 3–4, 136–37, 222n173; postmortem cesarean manual by, 240n32; Protomedicato under, 4, 136, 256n10; on religion in

284 ·

Flores, José (continued) antiepidemic campaigns, 22–23; in Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition, 3–5, 172, 176, 204n10; on smallpox as legacy of conquest, 30; in smallpox epidemic of 1780, 3–4, 55–60, 198; in smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796, 136–37, 144–56; smallpox inoculation manual by, 17–18, 22, 144–56, 250n71; smallpox inoculation tested on servant by, 60, 176; on smallpox vaccine experiments, 172, 258nn46–47; on temascales, 71; travels of, 204n9; in typhus epidemic of 1796, 72–73 Flores, José Gregorio, 46 flowers, at burials, 47 food shortages, 33, 64. See also diet forceps, 113–14 Foucault, Michel, 18 Francisca, Juana, 46 Francos y Monroy, Cayetano, 99 Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco Antonio de, 38, 41–44, 106–7, 216n47 fumigation, 67, 73, 143 Gage, Thomas, 38–39, 65, 216n51 Galindo, Margarita, 182 Galvani, Luigi, 136 Gálvez, Cristobal Silvero de, 96, 120 Gálvez, Francisca de, 106 Gálvez, Matías de, 44, 248n27 García, Andrés, 106 García, Mariano, 181–82 Gazeta de Guatemala: on anthrax, 175; on cowpox, 171–72; establishment of, 8; on postmortem cesareans, 97, 112–14, 116–19; pseudonyms used in, 211n72, 242n77; readership of, 8, 114, 207n25, 208n38; on smallpox inoculation, 56; on smallpox vaccine, deployment of, 180, 182, 186, 187, 189, 261nn97–98; on smallpox vaccine, experiments with, 176–77, 179, 257n24; on smallpox vaccine, search for, 167–69; on thermal baths, 70 Gazeta de Madrid, 5, 116

Index

Gazeta de México, 51, 226n35, 243n84 Genio de la Libertad, El (newspaper), 198 Geraldino, Francisco, 68 Ginsburg, Faye, 98 Godinez, Gertrudis, 191–92, 264nn186–87 Godinez, José Antonio, 191–93, 264n186 Goicoechea, José, 58 Goicoechea, José Antonio, 242n77 Golpeado, Marcelino, 125, 245n122 Gómez, Catalina, 106 González, Alba, 90 González, Antonio, 174 González, Domingo, 139, 156, 160–61, 162 González, Felix, 189 González, Francisca, 105 González, J. Augusto, 237n13 González, Josefa, 182, 262n115, 262n119 González, Manuel, 77 Gordillo, Marcelo, 140 Gosner, Kevin, 254n160 Grandin, Greg, 222n180 Guamogo, María Manuela, 246n153 Guatemala, colonial: boundaries of, 4, 6, 204n4; as kingdom vs. Audiencia, 100, 238n19; map of, 6; use of term, 204n4 Guatemala, postcolonial, doctors in politics of, 198–99 Guatemalans, first use of term, 8 Guerra, Nasario, 75 Guzmán, Pablo José, 191 haircuts, 144, 250n67, 251n99 Hall, Carolyn, 138 Haller, Albrecht, 110 healers: divination by, 37, 77; smallpox inoculation by, 147–48; in typhus epidemics, 72, 76–77 healing, miraculous, 39–41, 44, 182 Hernández, Estebán, 46 Hernández, Gerónimo, 15 Herrarte, Mariano José, 18–20, 211n62 Herrera, Siriaco, 46 Heyden, Doris, 230n105 Hidalgo, Domingo, 143 Hidalgo, Manuel, 138, 140

Index

highlands, smallpox in. See smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796 Hill, Robert M., 76 Historical Atlas of Central America (Hall and Brignoli), 138 homes, in typhus epidemics, 65, 67, 81, 93 homicide, fetal, 125–28 Honduras, smallpox vaccine in, 186–87 hospitals: in antityphus campaigns, 78–79; as disciplining institutions, 71, 227n59; food served in, 53–54; language barriers in, 54, 195; in Nueva Guatemala, 57, 58, 222n173, 222n183 hot springs, 41–42, 69–70 Huehuetenango, 246n4 human, expansion of category of, 32, 104, 134, 161 Humaña, Josefa, 46–47 human experimentation: of smallpox inoculation, 60, 176; of smallpox vaccine, 166, 168, 173, 174–80, 260n88, 261n94; subjects used in, 175–77, 223n189 humanitarianism: emergence and development of, 10–11; and Indian resistance to colonial medicine, 199–200; internationalism through, 208n39; in measles outbreak of 1769, 48–50, 53; in postmortem cesareans, 100–104, 111; religion in, 23–24; in responses to epidemic death, 32–35, 198; in smallpox inoculation, 55–61, 134, 161; transformation into patriotism, 199–200 human sacrifice, 147 human suffering, 31–35, 198 humors, 66–67 idolatry, 47, 67, 81, 82 incense, 67 Indian(s): clothing of, 22; colonial accommodation of cultures of, 17–18, 145–47; conceptualizations of fetuses among, 104–10; contradictory representations of, 20; pathologization of, 24; priests’ relationships with, 22;

·

285

smallpox vaccine administered by, 188; susceptibility to diseases, 52, 76. See also elites, Indian; epidemic death; tributary Indians; and specific diseases Indian medicine. See Mesoamerican medical cultures Indian population: in capital cities, 19, 211n66; catastrophic decline from epidemic death, 30–32; of Jacaltenango, 137; modern, 213n7. See also censuses Indian resistance: to baptism, 109–10; forms of, 17; humanitarianism affected by, 199–200; in measles outbreak of 1769, 49; to postmortem cesareans, 115; to smallpox inoculation, 20, 134, 145, 158, 162–63; to smallpox quarantines, 139–41, 152; to smallpox vaccine, 188–96; in typhus epidemics, 88–95; through uprisings, 89–95, 139, 234n185 Indians in Unexpected Places (Deloria), 20 indigenous peoples. See Indian(s) inoculation, use of term, 203n1. See also smallpox inoculation Inquisition, 44 Instruction for the Method of Practicing Smallpox Inoculation (Flores), 17–18, 22, 144–56, 250n71 intendency system, 247n10 internationalism, 208n39 Iturbide, Pedro Mariano, 100–102, 108, 111, 112–13, 240n31, 242n67, 243n80 Itzá Maya, conquest of, 97 Jacaltenango parish: economy of, 137; Indian rituals at church of, 92; map of, 63; smallpox epidemics in, 137, 158, 159, 161 jaguar, 106, 241n51 Jakaltek Maya, language of, 80, 231n122 Jefferson, Thomas, 22, 256n19 Jenner, Edward: on adoption of smallpox vaccine, 5; development of smallpox vaccine by, 3, 165. See also smallpox vaccine

286

Juárez, Juan José: on deer antlers, 86–87, 88, 233n170; on sacred cave in Santa Eulalia, 82–83, 87–88; on typhus epidemics, 62, 64, 67, 79, 224n8 Junta de Salubridad, 56 juntas, medical: in measles outbreak of 1769, 48; on smallpox vaccine, 167–68, 177–89, 256n10, 262n132 Kaqchikel Maya: documents of, 213n1; language of, 42, 218n79; mortality from 1520 epidemic among, 29; mountains as refuge for, 76 Kashnipour, Ryan, 209n47 Kelton, Paul, 17 K’iche’ Maya, and smallpox vaccine, 188, 189, 191–93 knives, 145–47 Krech, Shepherd, 14 Lacayo, José Antonio, 187 La Farge, Oliver, 84–85, 86, 232n138, 233n161 lancets, 15, 59, 144–50 language barriers, 54, 195 Lanning, John Tate, 3, 119, 211n62, 211n72, 220n126, 223n195, 242n77 Lara, Celso, 90 Lara, Pedro Juan, 122–24 Larrave, Mariano: in antityphus campaigns, 73, 78–79; career of, 199, 259n62; in postcolonial politics, 199; and smallpox vaccine, 174, 175, 190, 256n10 last rites, 35, 215n26 Latin America, development of public sphere in, 8, 207n26 Latour, Bruno, 18 lay persons, 16–17; in antityphus campaigns, 73; postmortem cesareans performed by, 97, 102–3, 117–18; smallpox inoculation by, 147–48; smallpox vaccination by, 166, 187–88, 255n6; in smallpox vaccine experiments, 173–78. See also healers; ritual specialists Ledesma, José, 169

·

Index

leprosy, 182–83, 262n120 Letona, Manuel Ygnacio, 236n219 lice, 62, 64, 223n4 livestock: and smallpox vaccine, 170–78; in typhus epidemics, 66, 224n19, 225n21 Longinos Martínez, José, 9, 199 López, Francisco, 46 López, José, 83–84, 232n150 López, María, 217n64 López, Martín, 46 López, Pablo, 15 Lovell, W. George, 30, 204n6, 213n7, 261n103 Luna, Severino, 119, 120, 126–28, 245n130, 245n134 Lutz, Christopher, 30, 211n66, 213n7 Lux, Magdalena, 193 Lux, Miguel, 191, 193 Luzero, Manuel de Jesús, 191 Maceda, Francisco, 188 Maceda, Mariano, 188 Malkki, Liisa, 208n39 Manrique, Juan, 9 manuals and handbooks, 17–18; on baptism of miscarried fetuses, 108, 110; on herbal medicine, 54; on measles-smallpox outbreak, 49–53; on postmortem cesareans, 101–3, 108, 111, 113–15, 176, 240nn32–33, 240n41; on smallpox inoculation, 17–18, 22, 59, 74, 144–56, 250n71; on smallpox vaccine, 168, 169–70; on typhus treatments, 56, 67, 73, 100, 222n170 Marta, Juana, 46 Martín, Domingo, 15 Martínez de Zevallos, José María, 120, 122 Martínez Durán, Carlos, 222n173 Mata, Juan Ambrosio, 152 Mata, Luis, 182 Matías, Andrés, 77 May, Juana, 119 Maya medicine. See Mesoamerican medical cultures

Index

Maya population: catastrophic decline of, 30–31; current, 213n7. See also Indian(s); and specific groups Mayorga, Martín de, 56 McCaa, Robert, 50 McClive, Cathy, 242n72 measles epidemic of 1769, 219n107; colonial campaign against, 48–54; colonial treatment in, 48–54; differences in presentation of disease, 51; Indian susceptibility to, 52; Mesoamerican treatment in, 49, 52–53; official handbook on, 49–53; wakes in, 45, 219n107 medicine. See colonial medicine; Mesoamerican medical cultures; New World medical cultures Medina, José de, 50, 220n128 men: in postmortem cesareans, 97, 117–18, 131; in smallpox inoculation of children, 150 menstruation, and smallpox inoculation, 60, 155 Merlo, Manuel, 240n32, 256n10 Mesoamerican medical cultures: bad air in, 66–67; bleeding therapies in, 15–16, 146–47; colonial attacks on, 16; colonial use of knowledge in, 18–20, 155–56; diversity of, 15; historical records on, 14–15, 37; influence on New World medical cultures, 13–14, 16–17; interactions between colonial medicine and, 14–20; and postmortem cesareans, 118–19; religious practice tied to, 37; scholarship on, gaps in, 13–14; as timeless, colonial perception of, 19; use of term, 15. See also specific diseases Mesquita, Juan de, 35 Method Used for Curing Measles and Smallpox, 49–53 Mexicanos, Feliciana Margarita, 122–24, 123, 131, 245n133 Mexico: smallpox inoculation in, 55; smallpox vaccine in, 168 Meyda, Rosa, 125–28, 132 Miguel, Cayetano, 82

·

287

military: in antityphus campaigns, 80–82, 93–94; colonial officials from, 138; and contradictions of humanitarian medicine, 199; in smallpox inoculation campaigns, 143–44, 152, 161; in smallpox quarantines, 138–41, 152 miraculous healing, 39–41, 44, 182 miscarriages: baptism after, 108, 110, 112, 153; caused by smallpox, 153–54; caused by violence against women, 121–32, 243n95 modernity, and postmortem cesareans, 100–101, 104, 132 Molina, Antonio de, 34–35 Molina, Juan de, 173–75, 176, 259n54, 259n56 Molina, Pedro, 194–96, 198–99, 256n10 Molina, Santiago, 174 Montejo, Joaquín, 82 Montepeqe, Gregoria, 46 Montepeqe, María, 46 Montero, Francisco, 69 Monteros, Nicolás, 261n97 Montoya, Angela María, 126 Montúfar, Lorenzo, 129, 245n143 Montúfar, Nicolás, 127, 245n133 Morel, Estebán, 55 mortality rates: during conquest period, 29–31; for cumatz, 41; Indian vs. whole population, 32; for smallpox, 4, 55, 158, 204n6; for typhus, 64 mountains, as refuge, 76–79, 193, 229n94, 229n97 Moziño, José Marino, 168 music, 45–47, 184 nationalism, Creole, 11 Natural History Museum, 9–10, 199 Nava, Juan Jesús de, 194, 195 Nebaj, resistance to antityphus campaign in, 89–95, 139, 234n185 Needham, Joseph, 110 New Aspects on Medical-Moral Theology (Rodríguez), 101, 239n26

288

New World medical cultures: circulation of knowledge in, 12–13, 19–20, 166; conflict among, 16; Creole-peninsular divide in, lack of, 11; Enlightenment vision for role of, 4–5, 10–11, 61; Mesoamerican influence on, 13–14, 16–17. See also colonial medicine; Mesoamerican medical cultures Nicaragua, smallpox vaccine in, 180 Nicolás (saint), 39–41 Nueva Guatemala: capital moved to, 56–57; vs. highlands, smallpox inoculation campaigns in, 134; hospital in, 57, 58, 222n173, 222n183; Indian population of, 19; printing houses in, 8, 59; smallpox inoculation introduced in, 4, 55–60; smallpox vaccine in, 179–81 Obregón, Nicolás, 148 obsidian blades, 146–47 ocote, 86, 233n165 Oglesby, Liz, 229n94 Omoa, smallpox vaccine in, 186–87 Orellana, José María, 78 Pablo, Francisco, 87 Pabón, Cayetano, 178–79 Pabón, Manuel, 178–79 Pabón y Muñoz, Ignacio, 178–79 Pacay, Pedro, 77 Pacheco, Gervasia, 125–26, 245n130 Palacios, Manuel, 256n16 Palma, Maria de la Luz, 130, 246n152 Pamphlet that Teaches the [Jenner] Vaccination Method (Córdova), 17–18 Panameño, Eusebio, 46 Paniagua, María Cecilia, 107 Pastor, Francisco, 11–12, 27, 180, 209n42, 256n9, 261n103 pathologization, of colonial subjects, 24 patriotism, 200 Pavón y Muñoz, Ignacio, 12 Pech, Antonia, 39–41 peninsular-Creole divide, 9, 11 peninsular Spaniards, definition of, 9 Pérez, Bartolomé, 76–77

·

Index

Pérez, Juana, 124 Pérez, Santiago, 189 Pérez Brignoli, Héctor, 138 Pérez Yboy, Matías, 47 perlesia, 155 Peru: postmortem cesareans in, 100; smallpox inoculation in, 55 pharmacies, 53–54 Phillip II (king of Spain), 37 piety, 34–36 Pineda, Antonio, 122–24 Piñol y Muñoz, Tadeo, 125–28 plants: in herbal medicine recipes, 54; in Mesoamerican medicine, 18–19; in treatment of smallpox, 155; in treatment of typhus, 65, 67–68, 225nn32–34 Polanco, Edward, 225n32 politics, postcolonial, doctors in, 198–99 Ponce, Alonso, 42 poor, the: and smallpox inoculation, 57–58; in typhus epidemics, 33; as vectors of contagion, 58, 222n180 Popul Vuh, 66 Portillo, Ramón, 261n94 pregnancy: medicalization of, 24, 114, 243n89; smallpox inoculation during, 60, 153–54; sorcery’s impact on, 106–8. See also cesareans; fetuses; miscarriages priests: in antityphus campaigns, 75, 79–80; incense burned by, 67; language barriers faced by, 54; in measles outbreak of 1769, 48, 54; medical contributions and influence of, 21–23; postmortem cesareans performed by, 22, 102, 119; responses to mass epidemic death, 34–37; and sacred spaces of Indians, 79–80, 82–83, 231n119; smallpox epidemics reported by, 137, 142; in smallpox inoculation, 22, 148, 149, 152, 157, 184, 262n127; in smallpox vaccination, 22–23, 184, 185–86, 188–89 print culture, rise of, 8–9, 207n26. See also manuals Protomedicato: Córdova as head of, 167, 181, 256n10; Esparragosa as head of,

Index

181, 262n110; establishment of, 220n126, 223n195; Flores as head of, 4, 136, 256n10; in smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796, 133, 136, 139; in smallpox vaccine, deployment of, 179–82; in smallpox vaccine, experiments with, 170–78; in smallpox vaccine, search for, 167–70; on temascales, 71; on typhus epidemics, 75. See also specific officials pseudonyms, 211n72, 242n77 Pu, Gaspar, 192, 193 Pu, Miguel, 193 public health campaigns: elites’ involvement in, 10–11; forms of resistance to, 17; gaps in scholarship on, 18; negative outcomes of, 13, 24–25; religion in, 22–23. See also antiepidemic campaigns; and specific diseases public sphere, development of, 8, 207n26 Puerto Rico: smallpox inoculation in, 209n44, 222n167; smallpox vaccine in, 256n9 Pujul, Juan, 77 purification rituals, 47, 67 quarantines. See smallpox quarantines Quer, José, 19 Quetzaltenango: location of, 133–34; smallpox inoculation in, 142; smallpox quarantines in, 133, 136–41, 143 Quiñones, Dr., 180, 261n98 rabies, 183 Ramírez, Alejandro, 168 Ramírez, Francisco, 80 Ramírez, Pedro, 46 Ramírez, Santiago, 77, 230n102 Ramón, Diego, 87 Raoult, Didier, 223n4 Rapp, Rayna, 98 Recordación Florida (Fuentes y Guzmán), 106–7 Relaciones Geográficas, 37 religion, colonial. See Christianity

·

289

religion, Indian, in responses to mass epidemic death, 37–44. See also rituals religious personnel, medical duties of, 21–22. See also healers; priests reproductive health: Flores’s work in, 136; hot springs in, 70; plants used for, 68, 225n34; and smallpox inoculation, 153–54; sorcery’s impact on, 105–7. See also pregnancy Riche, Juana, 46 rituals, Christian, in response to mass epidemic death, 35–37. See also baptism rituals, Indian: at adoratorios and caves, 79–88; bloodletting in, 146–47; at parish churches at night, 91–92; in response to mass epidemic death, 37–47. See also specific types ritual specialists: divination by, 37–38, 42–43, 77; response to mass epidemic death, 37–44; shape shifting by, 104, 240n42; in typhus epidemics, 76–77; use of term, 215n36. See also healers; priests Rivera, Francisco, 260n88 Rivera, Mariano, 182 Rodríguez, Antonio José, 101, 102, 110, 116, 239n26 Rodríguez, Diego, 77 Rodríguez, Leonicio, 46 Rogel, Bonifacio, 125–28 Roger, Jacques, 242n72 Rosa, Juan de la, 79–80, 231nn121–22 Ross, Amy, 215n31 Royal Economic Society, 9, 22, 207n27 Royal Hospital, 53–54 Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition (1803–1806), 3–5; alternative names for, 203n1; antismallpox programs before arrival of, 11–12, 167, 180; arrival in Guatemala, 11, 27, 180, 209n42, 256n9; Flores’s contributions to, 3–5, 172, 176, 204n10; geographic extent of, 5; launch of, 5, 10; origins and development of, 3–5; religion in, 23; storage and transport of vaccine in, 176, 180, 258n28

290 ·

Rueche, Elena, 72, 227n67 Ruela, Joaquín, 127–28 Ruiz, Ignacio, 184 Ruiz, Olga, 225n34 Ruiz, Sebastián, 75 Ruiz de Cevallo, Ignacio, 177, 189 Saavedra y Alfaro, Andrés, 190 Sabaleta, Manuela de, 129–30, 245n147 Sacred Embryology (Cangiamila), 101, 103, 113 sacred spaces, in typhus epidemics, 65, 77, 79–88 sahorin, 77, 229n99 saints, apparitions of, 39–44, 217n64 salaries: for medical bleeders, 228n80; of medical doctors, 228n79; for postinoculation caretakers, 151, 252n107; for smallpox quarantine workers, 138, 141, 247n24, 249n52 Salazar, Nicolás, 188 Salazar, Vicente, 260n88 salts, 70 San Antonio Aguascalientes, 41–43, 218n73 Sánchez-Cubillas Press, 59 San Diego y Arrevillaga, Tomás de, 105 Sanibal, Juan Santos, 143 Santa Eulalia, sacred cave in, 82–88, 83, 85, 232n157, 233n161 Santiago de Apastaque, infant wakes in, 45–47, 219n105 Santiago de Guatemala: colonial responses to mass epidemic death in, 34–36; earthquakes in, 56; Indian population of, 211n66; Royal Hospital in, 53–54 Santiago Sacatepéquez, resistance to colonial medicine in, 194–96 Saravía, Macedonio, 81 Savina, María, 107 Serra, Martín, 58 Serrano, Tomás, 107–8 shape shifting, 77, 104–7, 230n99, 240n42 sheep: anthrax in, 175; cowpox in, 178; in typhus epidemics, 66, 224n19, 225n21 Silvestre, Lázaro, 128–29

Index

slaves, 129–30 smallpox: eradication of, 5; immunity through cowpox exposure, 165; as legacy of conquest, 30; in measles outbreak of 1769, 48–54; misdiagnosis of, 143; modern stores of, 205n14; natural vs. inoculation cases of, 142, 249n55 smallpox epidemic(s): of 1780, 55–61, 158, 198; of 1800s, 3, 166–67, 255n7; accommodation of Indian cultures in, 17–18, 145–47; censuses after, 157–58; child mortality in, 4, 39–40, 204n6; colonial responses to mass death from, 35–36; human suffering in, 32–35, 198; measles combined with, 48–54; Mesoamerican treatment for, 60–61, 145, 162–63; mortality rate in, 4, 55, 158, 204n6 smallpox epidemic of 1794–1796, 26–27, 133–64; accommodation of Indian cultures in, 145–47; campaign to inoculate Indians in, 4, 142–56; censuses after, 157–58; colonial reports on outcomes of, 157–64; colonial surveillance of, 136–41, 153–54; contradictory representations of Indians in, 20; economic motives in response to, 133–34; humanitarianism in, 134, 161; Indian acceptance of inoculation in, 158–61; Indian resistance to inoculation in, 20, 134, 145–47, 162–63; inoculation by Indians in, 147–49; map of, 135; start of, 133–34. See also smallpox quarantines smallpox inoculation: colonial reports on outcomes of, 157–64; debates over, 55–56; definition and use of term, 203n1; documentation of, 58–59, 157–64; economic motivations for, 134; elites’ efforts to introduce, 11, 55; end of, after vaccine development, 167, 256n11; Flores’s experience with, 3, 4, 5, 55–60, 136–37; funding for, 57, 58; humanitarianism in, 55–61, 134, 161, 198; by Indians, 147–49; of

Index

Indians in epidemic of 1794–1796, 142–56; introduction of, 11, 31, 55–61; local vs. French method of, 59–60; manuals on, 17–18, 22, 59, 74, 144–56, 250n71; methods of, 59–60, 144–47; mortality rate before vs. after, 4, 55, 158; official approval of, 11, 56; origins and spread of use, 55, 212n85; physical reactions to, 12; priests’ participation in, 22, 148, 149, 152, 157, 184, 262n127; reasons for success of, 56; vs. vaccination, 3, 12 smallpox quarantines: Indian resistance to, 139–41, 152; after inoculation, 143, 152–53; military role in, 138–41, 152; for pregnant women and children, 154–55; as prevention measure, 133, 136–41, 246n2; salaries for workers in, 138, 141, 247n24, 249n52 smallpox vaccine, 27, 165–96; challenges of distributing, 185–91; circulation of knowledge of, 12, 165–66, 168; cowpox as key ingredient in, 3, 27, 165; definition and use of term, 203n1; deployment of, 178–91; development by Jenner, 3, 165; documentation of distribution, 181, 183–85; elites’ efforts to obtain, 11–12, 165–68, 256n16; experimentation with, 166, 168, 170–80; first use in Guatemala, 12, 179–80; Indian resistance to, 188–96; vs. inoculation, 3, 12; Jenner on quick adoption by Spanish, 5; juntas on, 167–68, 177–89, 256n10, 262n132; lay persons’ involvement with, 166, 173–78, 187–88, 255n6; manuals on, 168, 169–70; physical reactions to, 12, 182; as religious rite, 23; search for components to make, 11–12, 166–75; storage and transport of, 169–70, 185, 257–58nn27–28; Vaccine Laws on, 178, 182–86. See also Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition smell, of epidemics, 29–30, 65–67 Smith, Michael M., 261n94, 261n103 snakes, 38, 106–7 Sol, Manuel del, 181, 182–83, 187

·

291

Solis, Juan Ramón, 60–61 Soloma parish, 63, 137 Soltera, María la, 105 Soq’, Miguel, 191 sorcery: impact on fetuses and pregnancy, 104–8; and smallpox inoculation, 145–47 “sore-sickness,” 29 Sosa, Magdalena, 179, 260n88 Sowell, David, 17 Spain: medical innovation in, 5, 205n13; postmortem cesareans in, 98; smallpox inoculation in, 55 Spaniards, Creole vs. peninsular, 9 Spanish Constitution of 1812, 11 standardization, in colonial medicine, 100, 238n20 statistics, on smallpox inoculation, 58–59 stereotypes, 21, 221n150 Suárez, Mariano José, 190 sulfur fumigation, 67, 143 Sunzin de Herrera, Francisco, 108, 110, 241n64 surveillance, in smallpox inoculation campaign, 136–41, 153–54 tabardillo, 64 Tamayo, Esteban, 46 Tarazena, Gerónimo, 192 Taube, Karl, 84 tax relief, 34, 48–49 temascales: diversity of uses for, 70–71; in treatment of measles, 49; in treatment of smallpox, 61, 220n124; in treatment of typhus, 65, 68–69, 71, 74, 226n56 temples, in typhus epidemics, 65, 79–83 Tiu, Pedro, 191 toads, 105–8, 240n46 Todos Santos, resistance to antityphus campaign in, 92–93 Tot, Manuel, 188 Totonicapán: antityphus campaign in, 72–73; location of, 133–34; separation into districts, 246n4; smallpox inoculation campaign in, 142, 145–52, 158–59; smallpox quarantines in, 133, 136–41

292

Trejo, Ysabel, 122 tributary Indians: economic role of, 25, 32–33; legal status of, 33–34, 128–29; physical punishment of, 128–29; protections for, 33–34; tax relief offered to, 34, 48–49 Tuh, Diego, 77 typhus epidemics, 26, 62–95; approach of colonial campaigns against, 67, 72–79; bleeding therapies in, 71–72, 74, 77, 89–90; difficulty of identifying, 64; discovery of cure for, 224n13; funding for medical salaries and supplies in, 74–75; handbooks on treatment of, 56, 67, 73, 100, 222n170; Indian resistance to colonial medicine in, 88–95; Indian susceptibility to, 76; lice in transmission of, 62, 64, 223n4; Mesoamerican treatments in, 64–65, 68–72, 79–88; mortality rates in, 64; mountains as refuge during, 76–79; origins in New World, 62–64; plant-based treatments in, 65, 67–68, 225nn32–34; postmortem cesareans in, 100; reemergence of typhus in patients after, 64; sacred spaces in, 65, 77, 79–88; smell of, 65–67; thermal baths in, 68–71; towns abandoned in, 76, 78 Tzoi, Miguel, 192, 193 Ulloa, Antonio, 46 United States, smallpox vaccine in, 256n19 University of San Carlos, 4, 8, 136, 207n21 Urdiroz, Tomás, 169 Uribe-Urán, Victor M., 207n26 Uz, Juan, 191, 193 Uz, Ysabel, 193 vaccination. See smallpox vaccine Vaccine Laws, 178, 182–86 Valencia, Jacinto, 45–46 Valenzuela, Dolores, 260n88 Valle, Rosemary, 118 Valli, Dr., 177

·

Index

Varaona, Gerónima, 105 variolization, use of term, 203n1. See also smallpox inoculation Vázquez, Francisco, 39, 41, 43, 216n53 Vega, Victoriano, 46, 219n105 venereal disease, 18, 205n16 Viana, Nicolás, 205n16 viaticum, 35, 215n25 Villalobo, Barolo, 46 Villalta, Bernardina, 125–26, 245n128 Villa Urrutia, Eulogio, 260n88 Villa Urrutia, Jacobo de, 257nn21–22 Villegas, Juan Félix de, 9, 231n133 violence: ritual, 104–5; against women, miscarriages resulting from, 121–32, 243n95 Virbes, Mateo, 79 Virgin Mary apparitions, 217n64 virgin soil epidemics, 30 volcanoes, 69–70 Wading, Alfonso, 179, 260n88 Wading, Tomás, 257n22 wakes, 44–47, 219n105, 219n107 Warren, Adam, 100, 250n67 women: elite Indian, 40–41; at Natural History Museum opening, 10; in Royal Economic Society, 9; and smallpox inoculation, 60, 149–50, 250n69. See also pregnancy World Health Organization, 5 worms, 106, 241n54 Xajil Chronicle, 213n1 Ximénez, Francisco: on bleeding therapies, 15–16, 147, 148; on epidemic death, 33; on hot springs, 69, 70; on Mesoamerican knives, 147; on typhus treatments, 68, 225n33 Xingo, Juan Diego, 230n102, 230n108 Zamayac, 216n53; miraculous healing in, 39–41, 44 Zenteno, Prudencio de Cozar de Mariano Francisco, 227n58 Zuñiga, Francisco, 96, 120–21 Zurita, Manuel Lorenzo, 219n105

About the Author

Martha Few is an associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala and coeditor of Centering Animals in Latin American History.