Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru by Adam Warren

Author:Adam Warren [Warren, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Latin America, South America, Medical
ISBN: 9780822973874
Google: YxJVfWBcs5YC
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Published: 2010-10-24T04:55:05+00:00

Writing about conditions in the Hospital of San Lázaro after Peru gained independence from Spain in 1821, Dr. José Pezet blamed the facility's decline squarely on the changed nature of religious brotherhoods and notions of charity in Lima. He claimed hospitals had originally been organized around groups of men, moved by piety and charity, who developed rules for aiding and assisting the sick. The reform-minded doctor asserted, however, that these groups’ own thirst for power led them to lose sight of their pious mission. Blaming majordomos and brotherhoods for the leper hospital's decline in the previous ten years, Pezet suggested that the new government must carry out “the reform of these corporations or their total extinction, replacing them with a new form of administration that enhances how the institution is seen, satisfies the intentions of benefactors, and fulfills the most interesting goal of helping the poor and suffering of humanity.”110 Drawing on anticlerical, antiroyalist, and antipeninsular sentiments that were prevalent at the time, he stressed the particular importance of carrying out such reforms in the Hospital of San Lázaro. Its brotherhood, he claimed, largely comprised peninsular Spaniards.111

San Lázaro's former juez protector, Francisco Xavier Moreno Escandón, took a similar view after independence in 1821 but differed slightly in his characterization of the brotherhood. He described its members as enemies of humankind and of piety and as men who lacked principles and persisted in their attacks “until they achieved the sabotage of the treatment, and the end of Dr. Villalobos's work.” But Moreno believed one could not blame peninsulars alone. Rather, “all this has been carried out not just by Spaniards, but by the sons of this country, seen as capable with their notable garments, and taken to be religious figures.” Moreno nevertheless advocated abolishing the brotherhood, and he reasoned that Viceroy Avilés would have replaced its members with secular officials had his government lasted several months longer in 1806. Attempting to recover the city's medical prestige, moreover, he stressed that reviving the supposed cure in the hospital was important as an issue “of such interest to humanity, and especially to Lima, due to the glory it gives one of our own sons through its interesting application.”112

In the end, the conflicts over leprosy treatments reflected a far more complicated political environment for medical reforms and healing than any secular, reform-minded creole doctor of this generation could have initially imagined. For a short time, doctors transformed the very meaning of the disease and made it central to the processes of medical modernization and colonial scientific knowledge production.113 Although engaged in secular medicine and the evaluation of proof, they and their allies also employed religious teachings and beliefs about leprosy to defend both Villalobos's achievement and his position as the hospital's medical director. For example, encouraging Villalobos to appreciate the importance of his work, Moreno reminded him that throughout history there were no records of lepers cured other than “the miracles of Naaman in the Old Testament, and the ten lepers healed by our Redeemer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.