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

Introduction

1 In his first major publication, a work of rudimentary demographic analysis, a young doctor in Lima by the name of José Gregorio Paredes undertook a novel task. In 1807, just three years after receiving a medical degree at Lima’s University of San Marcos, Paredes attempted to predict how a promising new medical practice might transform the size and health of the city’s population. He concerned himself specifically with the widespread distribution and application of Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, which had been discovered in England eleven years earlier and had recently been made available to doctors in Peru. Drawing on parish and hospital records and combining them with census figures and information on infant mortality gathered from Lima’s foundling home, Paredes used statistical methods to “determine the population that would exist at the end of an indicated time period, assuming the prophylactic effect of the vaccine is successful.” In making this calculation, he also sought to compare his findings to what might happen if the colony’s doctors either neglected to employ the procedure or employed it incorrectly, prolonging the “cruel tyranny of smallpox” that had ravaged Peru’s inhabitants for centuries.1 In this way, he aimed to demonstrate that the vaccine was key to enabling Lima’s doctors to fulfill their recently formulated goals as colonial reformintroduction  warren text i-290.4.indd 1 7/23/10 10:42 AM 2 introduction ers. Prominent creole (American-born Spanish) physicians, who were the majority of physicians in Lima and often held positions of authority, had declared that they would use medicine to extend life expectancy, bring about population growth, and facilitate the colony’s regeneration. Paredes’s work was unique because very few Peruvian doctors had ever set out to calculate future population change, and none had ever done so with such precision. Paredes himself acknowledged that migration to and from Lima made accurate predictions about the city’s size difficult, and he did not even attempt to grapple with population figures for the viceroyalty of Peru as a whole. Nevertheless, he declared with certainty that the benefits of smallpox vaccination would be dramatic and would vastly outweigh the effects of the various processes of outward migration. He calculated that without the smallpox vaccine, Lima’s population would slowly climb, from 58,727 inhabitants in 1806 to a mere 84,658 inhabitants in 1906. If the vaccine were employed widely, however, the population would soar by another 44,085 people, to reach a total of 128,743 by 1906. The vaccine , furthermore, would eventually eliminate smallpox if administered to everyone in Peru. This mass vaccination would sharply increase life expectancy and reduce infant mortality. In Lima, it would lessen the number and frequency of epidemics in a city known for its residents’ poor health.2 Paredes lived and worked in the political, administrative, and economic heart of a colony that had once stretched the full length of South America and had flooded Spain’s treasury with silver. Founded in the 1530s, the viceroyalty of Peru quickly became famous for its mineral riches, located in Potosí and across the Andean highlands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period in which the Hapsburg monarchy ruled Spain, the colony’s coastal regions were likewise productive zones for plantation agriculture. Peru’s lowland capital, Lima, and its port of Callao constituted thriving, bustling, diverse merchant cities populated by both Americanborn and Spanish-born Spaniards (who were known, respectively, as creoles and peninsulars), free and enslaved Africans, people of mixed descent (known as mestizos and castas), and indigenous people legally categorized as Indians. The colony was, by all accounts, an enormously valuable part of Spain’s empire, and, in Europe, exotic tales of Lima’s inhabitants and the city’s riches abounded. In the eighteenth century, however, many among the political elite questioned these perceptions of Lima and Peru. Declining mining revenue, the successes of rival British and French colonies, and the rise to power of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid led many to blame practices of Hapswarren text i-290.4.indd 2 7/23/10 10:42 AM introduction 3 burg colonialism in the previous centuries for the failure to maximize Peru’s full productive potential. Crown authorities and prominent writers on both sides of the Atlantic disparaged both the colony’s gradual economic decline and its overall population loss since the Conquest. They debated...