HOSPITAL, MEXICO (ANOTHER VIEW) This hospital, as was noted in the caption to the other view of it (opp. page [272]), is the oldest foundation of this kind in America (1524) and is still in existence supported by the original endowment. The second oldest hospital in America was that of Santa Fé (in Mexico) founded in 1531 by a remarkable man who became Bishop of Michoacan, and who supported it at his own expense, besides forming at Santa Fe a community of thirty thousand Indians who lived like monks, practising hospitality and all the works of charity (A History of Nursing, Nutting and Dock, New York).
The medical school of the University of Lima, founded before the end of the sixteenth century, had meanwhile been discovered. Subsequently the medical school of the University of Mexico came to be known and the next tablet will have to be worded with due reference to that. The first chair in medicine was founded at the University of Mexico about 1580, almost two centuries before our first formal academic medical teaching in the United States was organized about 1770. During the course of a generation altogether seven chairs in medicine were founded in Mexico, including a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of dissection, a chair of therapeutics and one of prognostics. The medical school of the University of Lima was organized about the same time.
With our rather complacent modern method of belittling the past and our disinclination to admit that the Spaniards were doing anything in science that the English Americans were not to think of for nearly two centuries, it would be easy to conclude that the teaching at these medical schools must have been altogether trivial and of no significance. When it is learned that most of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen some of our generation might think it hopelessly backward, but it would be well for those who think so, to be reminded that during the century following the sixteenth, Sydenham in England, and Boerhaave in Holland, the most distinguished medical men of their time who are deservedly looked up to with great reverence by most of the distinguished teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a return to the broad, sane views and insistence on clinical observation of Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact the medical schools of both the University of Mexico and of Lima were furnishing quite as good a medical training as the average medical school of Europe at that time. They were modelled closely after the Spanish universities and were in intimate relations with them, even exchanging professors and students, and at the middle of the seventeenth century at least maintaining excellent standards.
From the very beginning, then, the Spanish Americans made a definite attempt to develop scientific knowledge in America. In medicine, in botany, in pharmacology, as well as in geography, philology, ethnology, and anthropology, there are magnificent contributions made by Spanish scholars. Many a Spanish university student and teacher spent time in this country investigating the properties of plants, especially their relations to medicine, and laying precious foundations in botany. Besides there were university scholars at home in Spain taking advantage of these field investigations to [{496}] compile works of serious character which are well known by those who are familiar with the history of botany and pharmacology. What the Spaniards were doing in America the Portuguese were doing in India and South Africa, and a very serious attempt was made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to bring to Europe every possible material, plant or mineral, that might be of value for human health and at the same time to increase the bounds of human knowledge by careful investigation.
Nor was this thoroughly scientific and practical education confined only to the upper classes nor exclusively to those of Spanish birth and blood. Even "the wild Indians," as Bourne tells us, "were successfully gathered together in a village called a Mission where, under the increasing supervision of the friars, they were taught the elements of letters and trained to peaceful, industrious and religious lives. In fact every mission was an industrial school, where the simple arts were taught by the friars, themselves in origin plain Spanish peasants." He continues, "Spanish America, from California and Texas, to Paraguay and Chili, was fringed with such establishments, the outposts of civilization, where many thousands of Indians went through a schooling which ended only with their lives." Bourne goes so far as to say "every town, Indian as well, as Spanish, was by law required to have its church, hospital, and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and the elements of religion." The Spaniards were actually anticipating for the young Indians some of the modes of vocational education, interest in which is only just being aroused among us at the present time.
No wonder that the work of conversion in Mexico followed hard upon the heels of conquest, and to quote Bourne's words farther, "The Aztec priesthood relaxed its bonds and the masses were relieved from the earlier burdens of the faith. In the old world the progress from actual to vicarious sacrifice for sin had been slow and painful through the ages; in the new it was accomplished in but a single generation. The old religion had inculcated a relatively high morality, but its dreadful rites overhung the present life like a black cloud and for the future it offered little consolation." ..."The work of the Church was rapidly adapted to the new field of labor." The triumph of the Church's influence was the preservation of the natives and their gradual uplift. This was a slow process and required almost divine patience, but it was infinitely better than the method by which the English-speaking colonies, in a chapter of history that is almost untellable in its [{497}] completeness, brought the natives of the country that they had invaded to ruin and practically obliteration. This experiment in applied sociology so successfully accomplished must be placed to the credit of the Spaniards also, and it stands out with all the more interest by contrast with English neglect of duty.
While seeing so clearly all that was accomplished in Mexico under the influence of the Church for education and social progress and scientific teaching and training in the arts and crafts and trades, Professor Bourne cannot quite bring himself to condemn entirely the almost complete failure that characterized all the relations of the English-speaking peoples to the natives here in America and he even seems to find some justification for their harsh treatment of the Indians. I think that our point of view generally has changed a great deal in this matter even in the last ten or fifteen years since we have come to recognize our social obligations more clearly and, above all, have come to appreciate better what is meant by "the white man's burden" in his relations to the dark-skinned peoples who are lower in the scale of civilization than we are. The Civil War did much to correct American notions on this point, but our attention to problems in the Philippines has done even more. I shall leave Professor Bourne's paragraph to speak for itself and each reader to say for himself whether the English method of dealing with the Indian is justified by comparison with the ruthless processes of nature as Professor Bourne would hint.
"Far different was the advancing frontier in English America with its clean sweep, its clash of elemental human forces. Our own method prepared a home for a more advanced civilization and a less variously mixed population and its present fruits seem to justify it as the ruthless processes of nature are justified; but a comparison of the two systems does not warrant self-righteousness on the part of the English in America."