The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville

6. Sanitation in the City

1. AMS, sec. 10, 1580 [2] (30 September). 6 sanitation in the city The city is very dirty and has a terrible odor. —count of villar T he meeting of wednesday, 28 September 1580, once again presided over by the Count of Villar, began on a positive note. The cabildo rejoiced at the good news from Badajoz that “His Majesty is well and without fever.” The council members decided to show the letter to church officials along with a renewed request to hold a general procession in the city to thank “Our Lord for the health of His Majesty” and to pray “for the general health of the community.” A few days later the councilors posted a letter addressed to the king expressing their satisfaction at the restoration of his health. But in Seville there were continuing signs of sickness. Two days after learning of the king’s recovery, the city council received a petition from the administrator of the Amor de Dios Hospital requesting five fanegas of wheat from the public granary each week for the hospital “because the number of sick has grown.” The cabildo acted quickly and passed a unanimous resolution granting the hospital the necessary wheat during the entire month of October to provide food for the extra patients treated there.1 The following Wednesday, 5 October, the cabildo decided to send several members to inspect the city’s hospitals and the treatment being administered to the sick. The councilors were particularly concerned with the mentally ill in the Casa de los Inocentes, founded around 1436 in the parish of San Marcos. The hospital,“where all those lacking judgment, be they furious or having manias, are sheltered and they cure them of this illness,”was one of the earliest establishments in Europe dedi- 52 | the plague files 2. AMS, sec. 10, 1580 [2]. Quote cited in Carmona García, El sistema de la hospitalidad, 55. Carmen López Alonso, Locura y sociedad en Sevilla: Historia del Hospital de los Inocentes (1436?– 1840) (Seville: Diputación Provincial, 1988), traces the foundation and functioning of this institution . 3. AMS, sec. 10, 1580 [2]; Carmona García, Crónica del malvivir, 81–83. cated to assisting the insane. As in the case of the prison, the city would have to act in case contagious disease broke out among the inmates of the mental hospital.2 During the same meeting another important issue was broached. The Count of Villar reported that many water pipes (caños) were spilling into the streets, and as a result “the city is very dirty and has a terrible odor, which causes great harm to health.” Problems resulting from either broken or overflowing pipes and public fountains often vexed both residents and city officials. The spilled water created puddles, some of them quite large, and the standing water, combined with the usual filth found in the streets, attracted insects and produced a nasty stench. The council did not need a long debate to approve the count’s recommendation to repair the caños and to punish any infractor tapping into the pipes with a penalty of ten thousand maravedís (twenty-seven ducats) and ten days in jail.3 In normal times the more affluent dead in Seville were interred inside parish churches or within the churches of the numerous convents, monasteries, and charitable hospitals. The poorer people were buried in the plazas adjacent to the temples. Not everyone agreed with this practice. When Licentiate Francisco de Morgaez, a priest in the Church of Santa Ana, lay dying in 1567, he was adamant about not being interred inside the temple. He insisted that “churches were founded for prayer,” and only the higher ecclesiastical authorities, such as bishops or abbots, should be buried inside, along with anyone whose life was miraculous, because their bodies “give good odor rather than bad.” Licentiate Morgaez cited early church canons and councils in stressing that “cemeteries were blessed to bury in them the bodies of the faithful dead”and that inside the churches, “where the Blessed Sacrament is kept and the saints and their relics and images are venerated, one should not put nearby anything foul-smelling, such as dead bodies.” Unfortunately, even in the churchyards, whenever mortality rose and hurried gravediggers dug insufficiently deep, the fetid smell of decaying flesh soon followed. Only during serious epidemics, when the number sanitation in the...