Santa Cruz Medicine

Clergymen in Ciudad de México appealed to Nuestra Señora de los Remedios before Guadalupe in the 1737 matlazáhuatl epidemic because she had been used in processions against smallpox since 1575. The most recent had occurred in 1733 and 1734.

Angélico Chávez found evidence a smallpox epidemic had ravaged Santa Ana from April to August of 1733. He also saw records in church archives of many deaths between May and June in Santa Fé and of 15 deaths in September at Laguna. Frederic Athearn found similar records for Jémez that year.

Smallpox had become routine, arriving once a generation. Robert McCaa said, everyone in Nueva España was "taught to prepare themselves for the eruption of the pustules. Once erupted, they were comforted, given water, food, and blankets, and cautioned not to bath or scratch until the scabs had fallen away."

Quarantine was the first response in Boston in 1721. Incoming ships were impounded, and guards stationed at the House of Representatives to keep out unscreened people. When the disease first reached Nueva España in 1520, McCaa said, "for the Nahua, quarantine was a completely alien notion." From the evidence of processions, it probably still wasn’t widely accepted in 1733.

Medical practice in Europe was beginning to change. Reports had been received from Turkey attesting to the effectiveness of inoculation with a weakened strain of the Variola virus. In Boston, a Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, passed on testimony from his slave, Onesimus, that he had been inoculated as a child in Africa. A friend tried the procedure on his own son and two slaves during the epidemic of 1721. When they survived, he treated another 194. Only six died. The normal death rate was 1 in 6.

The practice spread slowly. In 1743, the foundling hospital in London was inoculating its charges. Many young women who came to the city to work as servants had themselves treated before they sought employment. Inoculation still required quarantine to prevent spread of the deliberately introduced pathogen. The treated often bristled at isolation.

Smallpox returned to Mexico City in 1748, and again Chávez found evidence it spread north. In Santa Fé, 68 died between July and September of unspecified causes. Pecos had an unidentified epidemic in August. The pueblo had had a smallpox outbreak in the winter of 1738.

Santa Cruz was less prepared this time than last. One problem would have been identifying the source of the disease. Since its symptoms appear within 12 days of exposure, anyone coming north from México would have died on the trip from lack of care. That suggests it was spread by contaminated trade goods. There would have been no way or reason to scrutinize them before the disease spread.

The other problem was no one was available to oversee quarantine or mass care. Nuevo México had recruited no new barbers since those who came with the Reconquest. Antonio Durán de Armijo died in Santa Fé in 1753 at age 80. Our local man, Francisco Xavier Romero, died in 1732. For reasons mentioned in the post for 13 January 2016, he probably trained no one.

It’s possible others passed the fundamentals of medical practice through their families. Angela Leyba may have been a curing woman in the Chama area before she died in 1727. Her father had been a Tiwa translator before the Pueblo Revolt, and she had been spent the interregnum in Galisteo as a captive. Her will listed a statue of Our Lady of Remedios, a cupping glass used in promoting the flow of blood, and some coral bracelets. Her husband, who died the year before, had a picture of Remedios and a "barber’s case, with five razors and stone."

Bartolomé Trujillo may have been local practitioner. He also lived in Chama where he owned a "medicine glass" in 1764. His wife, Margarita Torres, was the daughter of Leyba and her husband Cristóbal de Torres. His parents had been Cristóbal Trujillo and María de Manzanares.

There still were herbalists in Santa Cruz, although they rarely were mentioned in official records. Tomasa de Manzanares was brought into a court case in 1748 when José Manuel Trujillo, Bartolome’s nephew, accused Antonio Valverde and his sons of wounding him. The 54-year-old said, she was providing herbal cures for "for lack of surgeons in the kingdom."

Although there were no medical professionals to treat illnesses, there must have been midwives. Although I’ve found no references to them, women were having babies. Their skill level might be inferred from the records of infant deaths within the first days after birth. It must be remembered though, children who died young may have been premature or malnourished at birth or had some other condition that couldn’t be treated then, but is now.

In addition to the five infants mentioned in the post for 9 May 2016 who received emergency baptisms, two other girls died soon after. That would mean the infant mortality rate within the first 24 hours for the 1,291 infants with at least one known parent was 5.5 per 1,000 births.

For comparison, the US rate in 2013 was 2.6, which ranked it 69^th among the 176 countries compared by Save the Children. Among those with 5 deaths per 1,000 were Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad. Some of the countries with 6 deaths were Paraguay and Surinam.

Notes: The cyclic nature of smallpox epidemics was discussed in the post for16 April 2015. Early barbers were discussed in the post for 19 April 2015. Coral was used later to ward off the evil eye.

Santa Cruz baptisms records indicated one child died early whose parents weren’t known. It’s hard to estimate the number of births in this group, because the baptisms also included adolescent and adult captives. In addition, servants and others without status may have had less contact with the church, so that even if a friar recorded a birth, he might not learn about a death.

Athearn, Frederic J. A Forgotten Kingdom, 1978.

Chávez, Angélico. Archives of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, 1678-1900, 1957. The burial registers haven’t been transcribed by the New Mexico Genealogical Society. Chávez summarized what he read, and noted the things he though most important. The information recorded by friars no doubt varied a great deal; only a few may have bothered to record causes of deaths.

_____. Origins of New Mexico Families, 1992 revised edition. He didn’t know the relationship between María and Tomasa Manzanares; he surmised José Manuel Trujillo was the son of Bartolomé.

Christmas, Henrietta Martinez. 1598 New Mexico, blog.

Davenport, Romola, Leonard Schwarz, and Jeremy Boulton. "The Decline of Adult Smallpox in Eighteenth-Century London," Economic History Review 64:1289-1314:2011.

Leyba, Angela. Will, 1727, republished by Christmas as "Angela Leyba - Will 1727," 30 July 2014.

New Mexico Genealogical Society, New Mexico Baptisms, Santa Cruz de la Cañada Church, Volume I, 1710 to 1794, transcribed by Virginia Langham Olmstead and compiled by Margaret Leonard Windham and Evelyn Luján Baca, 1994.

McCaa, Robert. "Revisioning Smallpox in Mexico City-Tenochtitlan, 1520-1950," 27 May 2000.

Save the Children USA. State of the World’s Mothers 2013, 2013.

Torres, Cristóbal. Will, 1726, republished by Christmas as "Cristóbal Torrez - Will 1726," 28 July 2014.

Trujillo, Bartolomé. Will, 1764, republished by Christmas as "Bartolomé Trujillo - Will 1764," 22 May 2013.

Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Spanish Archives of New Mexico: Compiled and Chronologically Arranged, volume 2, 1914; on Trujillo versus Valverde.

Wikipedia. Entry on Cotton Mather includes discussion of smallpox and inoculation in Boston.

Baptismal Names

Baptismal names in this period reflected a conviction the rite brought an infant under the church’s protection. The majority of the names used in both Nuevo México and New England had biblical origins, but the local ones were drawn from oral tradition while the others came from the Bible itself.

One element of the Reformation rejected by the Roman Catholic church was making translations of Bibles in vernacular languages available to parishioners. In Spain, owning a Bible was used as evidence a person was Jewish. The Inquisition made even references to the Jewish Old Testament suspect.

Between 1733 and 1759, 50% of the 1909 children baptized in Santa Cruz had New Testament names, but only less than 1% came for the older section. In one of my grandparent’s families living in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine in those years, 62% of the 149 children had names taken from the Old Testament and 28% from the new.

Source	Santa Cruz	New England
Old Testament	*	62%
New Testament	50%	28%
Founder	24%
Healer	8%
Golden Legend	7%	3%
Mystic	3%
Spanish Saint	2%
Attribute	1%	1%
Other Saint	3%
Other	2%	6%
Total	100%	100%

* = .15%

In Santa Cruz, the two Benitos alluded to Benjamin, founder of one of the twelve tribes of Israel in Genesis. The one Susana had a name that appeared in Daniel. In contrast, in New England where the Bible was readily available, names came primarily from Genesis, Kings, Chronicles, and Samuel.

The most common New Testament name in both areas came from the four Gospels. In Santa Cruz, there were 305 girls baptized with María as a first or second name. In my family, 11 were called Mary. One wonders, with nearly a third of the 948 girls given the same name, what they were called informally to differentiate them. One of the New England Marys was known as Molly.

Juan, after one of the apostles, was the second most common name for boys in Santa Cruz, and also used as Juana for girls. Joseph was the third most popular male name. Josepha was the female counterpart. José didn’t appear. John was given to five boys in New England. I suspect the six named Joseph were for the patriarch sold into slavery in Genesis.

Many of the other New Testament names used in Santa Cruz appeared in all four gospels. However Juan and Santiago did not appear in John and Joana was found only in Luke. Manuel from Emmanuel and Juan Baptista came from Matthew, the book most famously consulted by Francis of Assisi.

The local names that came from other books of the New Testament were Pablo and Paula from Acts, and Manuel, Manuela, Miguel and variants of Michaela from Revelations. In New England, Acts and Timothy were the other sources.

While English Calvinists drew their views on the human condition from the unpredictable Yahweh of the Old Testament, Spanish Catholics were given the church as exemplar for lives dedicated to perpetuating its patrimony. The lives of saints in the Flos Sanctorum was the accepted source for information about both Him and his guardians.

Anna and Joachin or Joachina, the names of Mary’s parents, came from that source, as did another 87 names used in Santa Cruz. The most popular were Lorenzo/Lorenza, Nicholas/Nicolosa, Patricio, and Dorotea. As discussed in the post for 24 April 2016, the English translation of Golden Legend also was widely read. My family named girls Anna, Lucia, and Dorothy.

Most of the remaining names used in Santa Cruz, some 47% came from saints and church fathers. Children were symbolically dedicated to the continuation of the institution. Franciscan fathers Antonio and Francisco ranked first and fourth among male names, and second and tenth among female. Ignacio and Ignacia acknowledged the progenitor of the Jesuits, and Gertrudis the champion of the Sacred Heart. Luis, with the female Luisa, was patron of the secular third order of the Franciscans.

Some of the saints recognized in Santa Cruz were unique to Spain. Many editions of Flos Sanctorum had been expanded with biographies of local heroes and heroines. The most common in Santa Cruz were Ramon or Reymundo, Quiteria, and Visente. Ones beatified in the New World included Aparicio, Beltran and Toribio. The names of mystics were only given to girls: the Benedictine Lugarda, the Augustinian Rita, and the Carmelite Teresa of Ávala.

One other naming habit shared by parents in both Santa Cruz and New England was the use of Christian virtues. Here they applied attributes to María and named girls Angela, Ascension or Prudencia. Boys were called Atanacio, literally meaning without death, and Ynociencio. My family used Mercy and Patience.

Girls' Names	Number	Source
Maria	305	NT - mother of Jesus
Antonia	99	Founder - Franciscans
Joana	41	NT Luke - healed by Christ
Manuela	37
Juana	34
Barbara	32	Holy helper
Josepha	32
Anna	23	James - mother of Mary
Gertrudis	22	Mystic - Sacred Heart
Francisca	19
Rosa/Rosalia	33	Healer
Teresa	15	Spanish mystic
Margarita	14	Holy helper
Isabel	13	Founder - Poor Clares
Micaela/Micalina/Mica	15
Juliana	12
Ignacia	11
Lugarda	11	Mystic - Benedictine
Luisa	10
Rita	10	Mystic - Augustinian
Boys' Names
Antonio	179	Founder - Franciscans
Juan	129	NT - apostle
Joseph	115	NT - father of Jesus
Francisco	44	Founder - Franciscans
Manuel	37	NT Matthew
Miguel	34	NT Revelations
Cristobal	25	Healer
Pedro	25	NT - apostle
Domingo	20	Founder - Domincans
Julian	18	Healer
Felipe	17	NT - apostle
Santiago	17	NT - apostle
Salvador	15	NT - attribute of Christ
Ignacio	14	Founder - Jesuits
Luis	11	Founder - Franciscans
Pablo	11	NT Acts - apostle
Andres	10	NT - apostle
Gregorio	10	Other - pope
Joachin	10	James - father of Mary
Juan Bapitsta	10	NT Matthew - baptized Christ

Female names without sources appear in the list of male names

Notes:
Santa Cruz data from New Mexico Genealogical Society, New Mexico Baptisms, Santa Cruz de la Cañada Church, Volume I, 1710 to 1794, transcribed by Virginia Langham Olmstead and compiled by Margaret Leonard Windham and Evelyn Luján Baca, 1994.

The sacramental register has a number of missing pages, so the total is an undercount. The total also does not include Spanish-speakers living near San Juan or Santa Clara who baptized their children in one of those missions. Those omissions would have affected the demographic statistics, but probably wouldn’t have altered conclusions regarding naming patterns.

My grandparent’s immigrant ancestor William and his wife arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony before 1637 with their four children, William, Thomas, Sarah, and John. Their great-grandchildren, the fourth generation, born between 1733 and 1760 were the ones used for the statistics for comparative New England naming patterns.

The family’s only atypical characteristic was that William was not a Puritan. His children, who had common English names, adopted Calvinist ones for their children, the third generation, and most probably affiliated with the church.

Quotations from Jonathan Edwards in the post for 24 April 2016 gives an idea of the Puritan concept of God.

The Flos Sanctorum, or Golden Legend, was discussed in the post for 1 May 2016.

Revivals

Religious fervor has a tendency to abate with time. By 1740, many Puritans in New England had grown so comfortable with their faith they do longer wondered if they were among the elect. It had become the corollary of their financial success.

Then, George Whitefield came from England to preach outdoors without patronage from any particular clergyman or church. While his theology was Calvinist, his style was drawn from theater. The audience didn’t hear about a fearsome God, it experienced salvation. What we now call the First Great Awakening spread through Pennsylvania, New York and New England.

In Nueva España another form of inertia had set in. Even under the constrictions of drought and war, life was comfortable. As David Brading mentioned in the post for 30 March 2016, no one protested when parishes administered by religious orders were turned over to secular clergy in 1749.

Isidro Félix de Espinosa had little interest in chronicling Franciscan activities when asked by the order in Michoacán to write its history. Instead, the Querétaro native suggested, more was happening in the missionary colleges where Franciscans were training men to convert the pagans in Tejas. The challenges of new conquests were invigorating the faith of men.

In 1737, he published a biography of one man he knew from his years in Tejas. Antonio Margil de Jesús never looked anyone in the face lest he be tempted by the devil. He scourged himself daily, wore cilices three times a week, and every night went walking with a heavy cross.

A few years later Espinosa wrote a history of the Querétaro college where he had served as guardian. One of the men he identified as a model for young friars went into the fields barefoot every Friday. Melchoir López de Jesús carried "a heavy cross on his shoulders, a cord at his neck, and a crown of thorns pressed so tight that at times drops of blood drawn from the thorns could be seen on his venerable face."

Later, he wrote his own brother, Juan Antonio Pérez de Espinosa, slept on leather sheets, fasted regularly, wore cilices, scourged himself three times a week, and slept in a coffin. He kept a copy of his family tree decorated with skulls and skeletons.

Espinosa said nothing of his own habits, but did say when Margil and López were in Guatemala, they were so appalled by the prevailing idolatry they made the Indians repent by walking in public processions carrying crosses and wearing cilices.

While the two revivals occurred at roughly the same time, they differed in their consequences. The Great Awakening introduced a new style and new organization to reach a new audience, the artisans and yeomen who lived outside the Puritan, Quaker, and Anglican elites.

The Franciscan activities that attracted David Brading’s interest harkened back to medieval practice, perhaps done in the face of competition from Jesuits. Both were lobbying for rights to evangelize the Moqui when he was writing.

When the Jesuits were given the Moqui commission, Carlos Delgado and Ignacio del Pino went to the Moqui towns in 1743 and induced 144 Tiwa speakers to return. Then they demanded the governor, Gaspar de Mendoza, provide them with a pueblo. He refused to act without the viceroy’s authorization. Most of the returnees were sent to Jémez, the rest to Isleta.

Delgado was one of the men sent from Andalucía to the Querétaro college, but Jim Norris found he "left that group for unspecified reasons." No one I’ve read has said if he followed the self-mortification regimes of his college’s founders, but he did absorb their methods for conducting mass campaigns.

The next year, the head of the Franciscans in México recommended local friars direct their attention to the Navajo, who had been identified by Benito Crespo as potential Christians in 1730. Delgado and José de Irigoyen headed back west, distributed gifts, and claimed 4,000 souls.

The impressed viceroy authorized four missions with a garrison for the latter. The new governor, Joaquín Codallos, agreed to send an escort when Delgado, Irigoyen, and Pino returned west in 1745.

Juan Miguel Menchero followed them in 1746. He convinced 500 or 600 Athabascan speakers to move down to Cebolleta in the Ácoma region. However, when he returned two years later, the drought was so severe the springs had dried. The Navajo had been pushed south by the Utes who lived in an even more arid region. They could see the problems with sedentary agriculture.

In 1750, they told the priest assigned to Cebolleta, "they did not want pueblos now." They said, they were willing "to have water thrown upon" the heads of some of their children but they could not "stay in one place because they had been raised like deer." They thought maybe the ones who were baptized "might perhaps build a pueblo and have a father" someday.

In the meantime, Menchero did succeed in getting permission to resettle the Moqui émigrés at Sandía in 1748, satisfied he had planted "the seed of the Christian Faith among the residents of the pueblos of Ácoma, Laguna and Zía."

Notes: Cilices were what we commonly call hair shirts, although the rough cloths could be worn on the chest or around the loin. I don’t know if self-mortification was a dominant theme in the works of Espinosa, or was of particular interest to Brading. It may have been a matter of etiquette that individuals didn’t mention their own practices.

Brading, D. A. Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, 1994.

Espinosa, Isidro Félix de. Crónica Apostólica, 1746; cited by Brading on López.

_____. Crónica de la Provincia Franciscan, 1749 manuscript; cited by Brading on Franciscans in Michoacán.

_____. El familiar de la América, 1753 manuscript; cited by Brading on Juan Antonio Pérez de Espinosa

_____. El Peregrino, 1737; cited by Brading on Margil.

Menchero, Juan Miguel. Petition to Joaquín Codallos y Rabal, 5 April 1748; translation in Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Spanish Archives of New Mexico, volume 2, 1914.

Norris, Jim. After "The Year Eighty," 2000.

Reeve, Frank D. "The Navaho-Spanish Peace: 1720's-1770's," New Mexico Historical Review 34:9-40:1959.

Ruyamor, Fernando. Testimony as alcalde mayor of Ácoma and Laguna before Bernardo Antonio de Bustamante y Tagle at Ácoma, 18 April 1750, translation in Adolph F. A. Bandelier and Fanny R. Bandelier, Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, volume 3, 1937, translated and edited by Charles Wilson Hackett; quotation on free as deer.

Sanz de Lezaún, Juan. An account of lamentable happenings in New Mexico and of losses experienced daily in affairs spiritual and temporal, 4 November1760; translation in Adolph F. A. Bandelier and Fanny R. Bandelier, Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, volume 3, 1937, translated and edited by Charles Wilson Hackett.