Medicine and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms

5 Burial Reforms, Piety,and Popular Protest,1808–1850

157 Burial reforms, Piety, and Popular Protest, 1808–1850 5 In late May 1808, creole doctors, ecclesiastical authorities, and government officials intruded in unprecedented ways into the ritual life and religious practices of Lima’s ethnically and culturally diverse population . They did so to improve health conditions and increase the colony’s population. Citing royal decrees and a growing body of literature on the risks of residing and worshiping in proximity to the decomposing bodies of the dead (up to this point in time, many had been buried inside churches), officials redirected burials to a new public cemetery beyond the city walls. Furthermore, they called for strict laws to ensure that funeral rituals, processions, and burial customs would be carried out hygienically. By banning all burials within Lima and ordering that they henceforth take place only in the cemetery’s large, open-air structure of niches and its campo santo, or burial ground for the poor, authorities declared that they would liberate residents from epidemic and endemic diseases. In doing so, they would reduce mortality rates and increase life expectancy. Medical reformers in the early nineteenth century made funeral and burial practices a target of their work for several reasons. For one thing, Lima’s creole physicians believed miasmas, or noxious airs that escaped from the decomposing bodies of the dead, had caused many of the rewarren text i-290.4.indd 157 7/23/10 10:42 AM 158 Burial reforms, Piety, and Popular Protest spiratory illnesses for which the city had become notorious. Moreover, they claimed that decomposing bodies had contaminated the water supply in some neighborhoods, which, they argued, explained the population’s tendency to suffer from gastrointestinal diseases. Both kinds of diseases, they proposed, often proved fatal or severely weakened those who survived . Drawing on the works of eighteenth-century European doctors and scientists who had also written about miasmas and the spread of illness, local doctors applied their theories to Lima in novel ways. Arguing for the uniqueness of the city’s climate and health problems, they suggested that preventing the production of miasmatic airs and the contamination of water would improve health, increase productivity, and lead to the city’s regeneration.1 It was not the first time creole physicians and government officials had attempted to reshape popular customs and practices, nor was it the first time they had sought to limit the Church’s power on matters related to health. In many ways, however, it was the boldest attempt of its sort. By requiring that burials take place in a cemetery, creole medical reformers waged an assault on a key belief among Catholics: that burial in or near churches was crucial for facilitating the soul’s escape from purgatory and his or her passage to heaven. In making their case to alter traditional burial practices, doctors allied with reformers within the Church, who decried the ills of baroque piety and ritual, promoting in its place a private, contemplative piety and more modest ceremonies. Both these groups challenged the ability of families to use burials near the altar as markers of their social status. They transformed and sanitized churches in which the arrangement of burial locations had come to reflect the city’s social hierarchy . Furthermore, reformers limited priests’ spiritual duties and their authority to organize rituals and honor the deceased, banning lavish funerals and processions and restricting priestly activities in the cemetery itself. By appropriating more modest, contemplative forms of piety and attacking baroque religiosity, which focused on extravagant and external demonstrations of piety, creole doctors and government officials implemented a reform that was distinct in its reach. It required residents and church officials to rethink the passage to the afterlife and the nature of one’s relationship to God in order to free the city from epidemics.2 Because of popular beliefs about death and the afterlife, the banning of church burials in 1808 opened up a Pandora’s box. Conflicts and tensions arose among different branches of the Church, various sectors of lay society , and modernizing creole doctors and government officials. These tenwarren text i-290.4.indd 158 7/23/10 10:42 AM Burial reforms, Piety, and Popular Protest 159 sions persisted well into the 1840s despite the political and social changes caused by the political crisis of the 1810s and independence from Spain. Conflicts among religious groups, ordinary residents of Lima, and reformers took several forms...