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6 Cloistered Women in Health Care The Convent of Jesús María, Mexico City nuria SaLazar SiMarrO and Sarah E. OwEnS Recent studies have shed much light on cloistered convents and their relationship with the outside world.1 Even though at first glance one might assume that cloistered nuns, having taken their solemn vows of poverty, shut the gate to the outside world for good, this simply was not the case. Not only did nuns maintain open communication with the lay population , but at times they allowed secular people to enter their nunneries. Convents, however, could differ greatly from one another, depending on their order, time period, and location within the Catholic Atlantic world. A discalced Carmelite Spanish nun, for example from the 1600s, had a very different way of living from a Conceptionist calced woman religious in Mexico City.2 The former would eat together with other nuns in a single refectory, sleep on a simple bed in a common dormitory, live a life without servants or slaves, and when necessary take her turn in caring for sick nuns in the infirmary. The Mexican nun led a very different lifestyle. She could be the owner of her “cell,” sometimes a large apartment with a bedroom, kitchen, and living area. If she came from a wealthy family she would bring with her servants and slaves to take care of the cooking and cleaning. She might also invite other family members, both young and old, to share her living spaces. Although like a discalced nun, she could also serve as a nurse in the infirmary, she would not need to stoop to the menial labor of cleaning bedpans or changing sheets (the servant class would be assigned those tasks). In sum, she had a very comfortable way of life, not too different from that of a wealthy woman outside of the convent. Although strict orders of nuns such as the Carmelites and Capuchins did exist in the New World, the majority of nuns in Mexico opted for 128 Cloistered Women in Health Care 129 calced orders, allowing them to maintain some of their wealth and status from their previous lives, even more so than the same types of communities back in Spain. This well-to-do standard of living within calced convents of Mexico City is especially evident in the Conceptionist Convent of Jesús María, relatively one of the wealthiest and largest nunneries in New Spain.3 Upon closer examination, this becomes particularly noteworthy when analyzing the health care provided to the nuns themselves. These women did not pinch pennies when it came to caring for sick sisters. They spent considerable sums of money on visits from doctors and surgeons. Secular medical personnel entered the inner confines of the cloistered environment and attended to a wide variety of maladies, anything ranging from simple infections to kidney stones. When necessary, the women bought medicines from local pharmacies and stocked their own medicine cabinet . They kept a large and clean infirmary. A staff of trained nurses (the nuns themselves) tended to the sick patients. Servants and slaves assisted the nurses and at times aided them with traditional remedies passed down from indigenous traditions. This essay uses the Convent of Jesús María as a snapshot to illuminate health care provided to religious women in early modern Mexico and the greater Catholic Atlantic world. It also serves as a window to understanding how calced convents in Mexico provided a safe haven for women of African, mixed, or indigenous descent within colonial society. Further, it will discuss how a multiethnic community brought with them diverse notions of health care, providing the sick patients a combination of traditional medicine from the Iberian Peninsula with indigenous healing drawn from pre-Hispanic roots. The first part of the chapter will cover the origins of the Conceptionist order on the Iberian Peninsula and the founding of the first convents in New Spain. The second half will analyze convent life and health care in female religious orders, specifically exploring the case of Jesús María. The time period covered in this chapter corresponds to Jesús María’s heyday, approximately from 1600 until the mid-1700s. Typically, only white women of Spanish descent could profess as black-veiled nuns, but these boundaries were blurred especially when it came to mestizas (women of indigenous and Spanish descent). Additionally, behind the cloistered walls lived many lay women. There were numerous servants and slaves (mulatas, indigenous, and...

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