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1. AMS, sec. 13, siglo XVI, vol. 6 (21 April 1582). Antonio Carreras Panchón, “Las epidemias de peste en la España del Renacimiento,” Asclepio 29 (1977): 7–8, suggests that debates among physicians regarding whether a place was infected with the plague allowed the civic authorities to delay quarantine, which was costly and detrimental to local commerce, thus contributing to the spread of the disease. Only when mortality levels became high did city officials implement preventive plague measures. 31 grave consequences From small beginnings very grave consequences would follow. —dr. alfonso daza G iven the conflicting reports regarding the sickness appearing among Seville’s populace, the plague commission decided to turn to the city’s physicians for advice on what steps to take. On 21 April the deputies asked the medical professionals to assess the cases they had treated in the past fifteen days and to declare these sicknesses as either pestilential or not. Because the pesthouses had been dismantled, the physicians were to give their opinion whether the situation warranted setting up temporary hospitals and convalescent houses. The deputies decided that it was not necessary to call a formal meeting of doctors and surgeons; instead, they should simply give sworn depositions.1 Fourteen physicians and two pharmacists , including some of the city’s best-regarded practitioners, gave detailed statements over the next two days. Licentiate Martín de Busto, a thirty-seven-year-old surgeon from the San Pedro parish, stated that he had treated many sick in the past twenty days. He declared that some had “pestilential sicknesses and bad symptoms, vomit as well as spots, which are signs of poisonous humor.” But the surgeon stressed that none of his patients had any buboes, and none of them died. He affirmed that“this sickness is common during this season,”and he was certain that it was not the plague. grave consequences | 239 The testimony of Licentiate Alonso López, a fifty-year-old surgeon from the Magdalena parish, was not as clear cut. He related having been called in to treat a woman and her son “who were stricken with the plague”; but when he arrived the woman had already been buried, and her son died soon thereafter. Licentiate López claimed that other people were sick with the plague as well. At the same time, the surgeon acknowledged that there were other sicknesses affecting the population, “lethargies and choleric fevers,” but he predicted that the outbreak, which he qualified as “contagious and dangerous,” would not last much longer, given that it was already approaching the end of April. Licentiate López’s belief that the milder and dryer weather would reduce the likelihood of sickness was not uncommon among early modern physicians, who often attributed the rise in the number of sick to inclement weather. Dr. Diego de Tamayo, a thirty-year-old surgeon from the San Salvador parish, stated that he had treated five people with the plague in the past fifteen days, “with their buboes in the groin and armpits,” and three of them had died. Dr. Tamayo noted that he was currently treating a young woman “of the said disease of the plague” but had very little hope for her recovery, because this was “a very dangerous disease that comes with great fury.” The young physician favored the founding of a hospital for the sick, to “prevent them from infecting each other.” He commented that the people he had visited were poor and lacked means for a cure and that most of the sick in general were poor. More physicians testified the next day, Sunday, 22 April, among them Dr. Bartolomé Hidalgo, who lived near the San Juan de la Palma Church. The famous surgeon concurred with some of his colleagues that several of the patients he had seen in the past fifteen days were “sick with the past sickness of the plague.” Dr. Hidalgo, who worked in the Cardenal Hospital, had treated four people stricken with the plague; three of them had died. He had also seen three cases of the plague in San Gil parish and several others elsewhere in the city. But the physician pointed out that in addition to the plague, there were other diseases, such as “lethargies and typhus and tertian fevers and quinsy” and others, and they mostly occurred among common people. Nevertheless, the surgeon believed that “at the moment there is no need to set up a hospital, because there are...

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