Murderous and negligent nurses: the hospital orders and crisis of care in eighteenth-century Mexico

In 1739, the viceroy and archbishop of New Spain accused an enfermero (male nurse) of strangling a patient on his deathbed at a hospital in Mexico City. The crime was not an isolated incident, but the culminating indictment in a seething report on the alleged abuses committed by members of the Order of San Hipólito, one of four nursing or hospital orders (órdenes hospitalarias) active in New Spain. This article uses the viceroy-archbishop’s report, and the reform movement it provoked, as a window into the history of religious nursing within New Spain’s hospitals during a moment of alarming decline and in the face of numerous obstacles, including chronic underfunding, shifting Church-state relations, and internal feuding. It introduces the hospital orders, religious brothers who took vows to hospitality (hospitalidad), as critical if overlooked actors in the history of medical care in the Spanish colony. It argues for viewing the crisis in hospital care as a crisis of religious values as the ideal of hospital nursing eroded as these orders found themselves embroiled in scandals and accused of widespread spiritual laxity.