"Like Herod's Massacre": Quarantines, Bourbon Reform, and Popular Protest in Oaxaca's Smallpox Epidemic, 1796-1797

At the end of August 1796, Balthasar Ruiz, a weaver from Teotitlán del Valle, departed with his son to sell woven goods in the mountainous region to the south. Over 23 days, he traveled a distance of 45 miles as the crow flies and upon his return was jailed when the boy fell ill with smallpox.¹ The two had made a typical journey in an atypical time: administrators throughout the intendancy of Oaxaca were actively pursuing a program of contagion avoidance as smallpox spread there from Guatemala and Chiapas. What Oaxaca's intendant, Antonio de Mora y Peysal, called the "new project" consisted of regulating travel and commerce and isolating infected residents in casas de curación. In Teotitlán, textile producers found themselves at the outskirts of their village laboring to build a makeshift infirmary for their children and a camposanto, a consecrated field, for burial of smallpox victims. Months later, some from the village would call the regime a violation "like Herod's massacre." At the time, quarantined in their village without access to markets or crops, there was little else for the men to do.

New Spain's late eighteenth-century experiments with disease management were the culmination of years of ferment in cities on both sides of the Atlantic. In Mexico City, a minority of literate subjects had been participating in a small but significant print sphere that disseminated scientific, medical, and philosophical knowledge. Self-proclaimed ilustrados like the creole polymath José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez and the creole physician José Ignacio Bartolache edited periodicals whose pages pitched the methods and results of the experimental sciences to the capital's small reading public. In 1772, the latter expressed the intellectual optimism of the age in his Mercurio Volante, when he imagined many more residents eventually studying medical science. He lamented that "those we call commoners" had been abandoned to their misery and that women too had been all but dismissed as useless for the sciences by learned men. But ordinary people, like trained physicians, had rational souls, and because good health was attainable by poor and rich, noble and commoner, old and young alike, all, Bartolache predicted, would soon play a part in the improvement of society by informing themselves about medicine, the most useful of the natural sciences.² With university and medical instruction still unreformed and disease outbreaks managed through loosely coordinated governmental response, an informed public would have to take up the slack.

Spain's Bourbon ministers drew on this learning as they conceived of a more rational approach to avoiding disease in accord with enlightened models of governance. Borrowing some cues from foreign rivals, they took on problems of population and industry and sought to apply scientific principles for the public good.³ An increase in revenue from key industries would require a healthier workforce, which meant combating the scourges of disease that seemed at every turn to restrict demographic growth. The program of epidemic management decreed in the 1780s and implemented in the 1790s would protect and enlighten New Spain's population through the uniform application of principles of contagion avoidance. It was a program adopted from a not wholly consistent miasma theory that targeted noxious smells and "pestilential" airs and involved codifying distances separating hospitals and cemeteries from nucleated settlements, imposing more rigid quarantines of people and communities, and making professionals caretakers available to the sick. In a 1788 viceregal order, administrators were directed to implement the contents of an instructional pamphlet to protect villages in future smallpox epidemics. The pamphlet paraphrased a 1784 medical treatise printed in Spain, in which royal surgeon Francisco Gil resolved an ongoing controversy on the merits of inoculation (a practice that involved making a small incision in the skin and introducing pus from an infected individual to provide immunity against future illness) by rejecting it as too dangerous. Older methods, including quarantine and cordons sanitaires around infected communities, were recommended instead.⁴ In prescribing constant vigilance and uniform isolation of infected people, homes, and...