Eulalie Mathieu

Making Sense of Disease in Colonial Potosí and Cuzco

Until the scientific revolution, most people viewed disease in the context of their religious

or spiritual beliefs. Religion and medicine were often intertwined. In particular, they often

understood disease and sickness to be a result of cosmic events and their gods’ displeasure.

This attitude is reflected in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s work History of the Imperial

Villa of Potosí that documented a plague in the Andean region from 1719-20. In Potosí, the

plague was viewed as the consequence of a cosmological event and a punishment by God for

people’s sins. In this paper, I will argue that the reactions of people in Potosí and elsewhere in

Latin America were primarily influenced by Catholic notions of sin and divine punishment that

were reflected in earlier plagues, but the influences of Hippocratic and Galenic theories as well

as Islamic medicine were also present and should not be underestimated.

In History of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, Arzáns devotes a significant portion of his

history to detailing the sins that he believes are responsible for angering God and bringing about

the plague and suffering. Arzáns, like most Potosí residents, was a devout Catholic and who

had a reciprocal relationship with his God. He believed that sin makes God angry and causes

pandemics and other natural disasters to be inflicted onto people as a form of punishment. In

efforts to protect themselves from the sickness, Potosí residents held religious processions

dedicated to certain saints and Catholic devotions,1 believing that they might convince God to

spare them. However, as these actions failed to stop the onslaught of the plague, people began

to wonder what sins they committed to fill their God with so much fury. Arzáns cites sexual

impurity as a principal cause of God’s anger, stating that “lasciviousness was so entrenched

among the youth of this Villa that none remembered that they had a God to fear nor a soul to

look after,”2 and calling women “enemies of the soul, domestic are the eyes that persuade the

1 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 54.

2 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 45
thief in the house.”3 In doing so, Arzáns places the bulk of the blame on women for the city’s

sexual sins. He also cites the inattendance of people to religious rituals and ceremonies as

other actions that angered God and caused him to inflict the plague.4 To Arzáns, the plague is a

religious event, meant to show God’s anger and fury with humanity. This understanding of the

plague as a form of divine punishment was the principal belief among Potosí residents at the

time.

A similar view of disease as a form of divine punishment was also prevalent in the city of

Cuzco, which was afflicted by the same plague as Potosí. The majority of Cuzco residents were

also Catholic and had similar beliefs about sin and their God. Like in Potosí, religious

processions meant to persuade God to spare the city occured in Cuzco5, to no avail. Diego

Esquivel y Navia, author of Chronological News of the Great City of Cuzco, describes how “not

a single [religious] [sic] image was less than encumbered with promises, nor a single saint

without payment for a special cult, imploring its patronage, and in particular those helpful

patrons in times of plague.”6 People in Cuzco and Potosí believed that saints could be invoked

through prayer for protection from harm and death. When the plague spread to Cuzco, residents

likewise blamed it on the sins of both individuals and the community as a whole.

The pattern of viewing diseases as religious events observed in Potosí and Cuzco was

not a new phenomenon. Just as Potosí and Cuzco residents understood the great Andean

pandemic to be a form of divine punishment, so too did residents of Walsham, England,

understand the Black Death during the 14th century. Prior to the arrival of the pestilence in

Walsham, villagers began hearing rumors about a great pestilence destroying cities in Italy and

southern France, including the holy city of Avignon, causing “anguish in the phlegmatic and

religious hysteria in the fervently pious.”7 In efforts to protect themselves, many villagers began

3 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 59.

4 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 48.
5 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 92.
6 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 94.
7 John Hatcher, The Black Death, 65.
praying to specific saints and relics and organized pilgrimages to cleanse them from their sins.

In late May 1348, a pilgrimage to Walsingham to “draw succor from the milk of the sweet Virgin

Mary [...] and to see her fabulously bejeweled wooden image, which time and again had worked

the most wondrous miracles.”8 As their religious efforts proved to be useless and news of the

plague reaching England was announced, villagers sought with increasing difficulty to

understand why their God would inflict such terrible suffering onto them. Priests were implored

to provide explanations to difficult questions such as, “But the sins of the pope in Avignon

should not mean that we who are innocent should also be killed?”9 European physicians and

healers during this time were faced with the perplexing dilemma of deciding whether or not they

would be interfering with God’s will by treating plague victims.10 As Europe experienced very few

medical breakthroughs during the Middle Ages, Christianity remained the primary vehicle for

making sense of disease. Thus, people naturally made sense of it as a punishment for sins.

While religious ideas about sin and retribution, specifically from Catholicism, were used

to explain the plague in Potosí and Cuzco, residents also drew on the ideas of Hippocrates and

Galen. Hippocratic and Galenic thought emphasizes the idea of disease as a natural occurrence

and suggests that disease could be caused by interactions and events in the natural world.11 In

his history, Arzáns attributes the cause of the Black Death to “a great earthquake [...] which

lasted fifteen full days, causing all pregnant women to miscarry.”12 Arzáns also directly states

that he considers God to be a “natural cause” of the pandemic.13 This is significant because it

serves as evidence of the syncretism of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine with Catholic beliefs

and spirituality. In his history, Esquivel states that the plague’s spread is caused by miasmas,

explaining that “aside from the pestiferous and variable air, the vapor was still more pernicious,

8 John Hatcher, The Black Death, 66.

9 John Hatcher, The Black Death, 87.
10 Adam Warren, “Explaining Plague and Managing Epidemics in Medieval Europe.”
11 Adam Warren, “Religion, Environment, and Disease in the Ancient World.”
12 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 50.
13 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 48.
putrid from so many cadavers and from the clothing of the contaminated thrown into the streets

and plazas, such that all became like rubbish heaps, so infectious that one could not walk

through them without the antidotes and preservative remedies that medicine recommends for

such cases.”14 This idea is clearly derived from Hippocratic and Galenic medicine.

Esquivel also draws on the theories of Hippocrates and Galen in his history. Hippocrates

theorized the four humors, or four fluids in the body that mimicked the characteristics of the four

elements in nature: yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth), blood (air), and phlegm (water).15

Esquivel directly applies to this theory when explaining the ways in which the disease attacks

the body, stating, “The humor that prevailed in the human body, providing material to the

infection of the pestilential and corrupt air was constant, as certified by the physicians as being

that of the choler, as is true in most epidemics. And they were persuaded, outside the common

symptoms, the headache and blood from the mouth, and the black issue from the nostrils, was

caused by the corruption and abduction of the humors.”16 Esquivel’s accrediting of the higher

death toll for indigenous Andeans to “their hot constitution”17 is another example of the influence

of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine on the understanding of the plague. Fever was associated

with heat, therefore it would have made sense to Esquivel and Spanish physicians that

indigenous Andeans were dying from an excess of heat. Furthermore, the ideas of Hippocrates

and Galen were also applied by the Spanish government when crafting new laws to improve

public health in the colonies. During the 18th century, a civil war was fought in Spain, which

resulted in the Bourbon family taking the throne. The Bourbons implemented a series of policies

meant to improve public health, which included the ceasing of burying dead in churches.18

Esquivel documents this in his history, stating, “The venerable dean and council of the cathedral

14 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 94.

15 Adam Warren, “Religion, Environment, and Disease in the Ancient World.”
16 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 91.
17 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 93.
18 Adam Warren, “Medical Reforms, Labor, and Colonial Power in the Atlantic World.”
ordered on 27 August that no more graves be opened inside the churches.”19 The reforms were

meant to stimulate population growth to increase the labor force and thereby make the colonies

more prosperous for Spain, and they were based on the Hippocratic idea of bad airs caused by

the smell of rotting corpses common in churches at the time.

As Hippocratic and Galenic medical theories were essential to residents’

conceptualization of the plague in Potosí and Cuzco, their understanding was also heavily

influenced by Islamic medical thought. During the Middle Ages, Islamic physicians translated

Hippocratic and Galenic texts into Arabic and stressed the influence of astrological events on

health. Muslim physicians hypothesizes that constellations could cause miasmas, earthquakes,

pandemics, and other natural disasters.20 For nearly 800 years, the Iberian peninsula was ruled

by the Umayyad caliphate, until the Reconquista returned the region to Catholic rule.21 Due to

the centuries of Spain under Muslim rule, the Spanish were likely more influenced by Islamic

medical thought than most other areas of Europe. This idea of events in the cosmos being a

cause of the great Andean pandemic was expressed in both the histories of Arzáns and

Esquivel. At the beginning of his work, Arzáns describes the passing of a comet over earth as a

bad omen, stating, “They signify, then, these signs [...]: famines, plagues, droughts, deaths of

princes, the fall of kingdoms and republics, wars and internal rebellions, atrocious and

imponderable events, and greater is the evil they signify when they come from a poorer quality

or type of planet or planets by whose influence they are engendered.”22 Arzáns goes on to

attribute the plague to “the bad influence of the stars,” explaining that the opposition of Saturn

and Mars, as well as Mars’ position in the solar system that year, were “very noxious for the

human temperament.”23 He continues to explain how more unusual events in the heavens made

it “clear that we would be infected” because the position of Mars “was found to be at its nearest

19 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 93.

20 Adam Warren, “Explaining Plague and Managing Epidemics in Medieval Europe.”
21 Adam Warren, “Old World Diseases and Demographic Collapse in the Americas.”
22 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 44.
23 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 51.
point to earth and to the east” and two eclipses, which were thought to be damaging to the

astrological signs of the villa.24 By contrast, Esquival does not blame the pandemic on a solar

eclipse, stating, “[S]ince this plague preceded the [total solar] [sic] eclipse of 15 August 1719,

this could not have been one of its effects.”25 However, while Esquivel states that the eclipse

was not the cause of this plague in Cuzco, he implies that an eclipse can be the cause of a

plague. These ideas are directly linked to the influence of Islamic medicine and cosmology.

During the great Andean pandemic, many people made sense of the onslaught of

disease and subsequent deaths around them through Catholic teaching, but were also heavily

influenced by Hippocratic and Galenic ideas and Islamic medicine. A sort of syncretism

emerged, in which people believed that diseases were directly caused by occurrences in the

natural world and astrological events, which were believed to ultimately be caused by God as a

punishment for sins. The idea of divine punishment was prevalent in Europe during the Black

Death, but the influences of Hippocrates, Galen, and Muslim physicians was not nearly as

strong. While Arzáns, Esquivel, and other residents of Potosí and Cuzco never knew about

germ theory and were wrong in their hypotheses, they used these ideas to understand the

sickness, suffering, and death around them.

24 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 51.

25 Kris Lane, “Pandemic in Potosí,” 90.
 Bibliography

Hatcher, John. The Black Death: A Personal History. New York: Da Capo Press, 2009.

Lane, Kris. “Pandemic in Potosí: Fear, Loathing, and Public Piety in a Colonial Mining

Metropolis.” Unpublished manuscript, last modified September 9, 2020. Microsoft Word

file.

Warren, Adam. “Religion, Environment, and Disease in the Ancient World.” HSTCMP

247: Global Health Histories. Class lecture at University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

October 6, 2020.

Warren, Adam. “Explaining Plague and Managing Epidemics in Medieval Europe.”

HSTCMP 247: Global Health Histories. Class lecture at University of Washington,

Seattle, WA, October 8, 2020.

Warren, Adam. “Old World Diseases and Demographic Collapse in the Americas.”

HSTCMP 247: Global Health Histories. Class lecture at University of Washington,

Seattle, WA. October 13, 2020.

Warren, Adam. “Medical Reforms, Labor, and Colonial Power in the Atlantic World.”

HSTCMP 247: Global Health Histories. Class lecture at University of Washington,

Seattle, WA. October 20, 2020.