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24 denying the plague There had not been nor is there now the said disease. —don enrique de guzmán ponce de león A t the same time as new areas became afflicted, some of the earliest towns to have dealt with the plague were reporting recovery . Officials in Cazalla de la Sierra had been attempting for some time to convince the Sevillian authorities that their community was healthy. In mid-February they sent a thorough report to the Count of Villar. Following deliberations, the count and the plague deputies, concluding that they needed additional proof, requested more testimony. Cazalla’s town council readily complied and by 2 March was able to send the required information . Cazalla’s magistrate declared in a letter that accompanied the depositions that health conditions there were good. He stressed that the only ones who had died were “very poor, miserable people who had nothing to cure or refresh themselves with.” The testimony had been taken on 26 February. Bachiller Hernán Vázquez Bocanegra, a local physician who had already testified during the earlier inquiry , reiterated his observations. He declared that in all the forty years he had served as the town’s physician he“had not seen so few sick here as at present.”He acknowledged that at the moment he had five people under his care, two with eye injuries, one with diarrhea, and two with fevers; but no one with any contagious disease. Another physician, the licentiate Salvador Estevan Frisado, swore that Cazalla was healthy and remarked that he had not treated any patients for the past three days. The surgeon Andrés Gutiérrez, who had been practicing in Cazalla for the past nine years, concurred with his older colleagues, insisting that the town was healthy. Cazalla’s two apothecaries, Juan de Velasco and Melchior Gallardo, whose boticas were located near each other on the same street, swore that in recent 184 | the plague files days they had not dispensed any medicines for the plague. There was only one parish in Cazalla, and five of its clerics testified to the clean bill of health, as did three monks in the local Franciscan monastery. The jurado Juan de Alava, a vecino of Seville living in Cazalla de la Sierra since May of 1581 who had traveled back and forth often in the past, claimed that Cazalla was now healthier than ever. Don Enrique de Guzmán Ponce de León, who had resided there for twenty years, agreed and declared that if that had not been the case he “would have gone to live outside this said town along with many of its caballeros and wealthy people,” noting that they “had not left because there had not been nor are there now the said diseases.” In closing, Don Enrique affirmed that “the bad reputation that this town has acquired regarding the said disease has been neither certain nor true.” The letter and depositions reached Seville within days and were read in the cabildo on 6 March. The Count of Villar, still not entirely persuaded, decided to send someone to“secretly”survey the situation in Cazalla. He dispatched the jurado Martín de Santofímia Riquelme to the town and instructed him to remain there for eight days.Among other things, he was to determine the number of days since the last death, whether or not the infected cloth had been burned, and how many houses were locked up. Even though this was to be a secret inspection , the count ordered a constable with his staff of justice to accompany the “undercover” agent. Taking special letters from Seville’s cabildo authorizing his entrance into Cazalla, Jurado Riquelme arrived there in the afternoon of Sunday, 11 March. The following day he visited the Los Remedios Hospital, where he questioned resident physician Bachiller Hernán Vázquez, who informed him that there were presently six patients under treatment. Two had pleurisy, one had come down with fevers, one woman suffered from idiopathic illness, and two people were recovering from fevers. The physician, who had already given various depositions, insisted that he had never treated the plague. He acknowledged that at the end of January some people in Cazalla were sick, and some thought that they had buboes. He had cured several of them, and three or four of his patients had died, but Hernán Vázquez noted that because they were very poor, they probably died of...

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