The ‘Alienated’ Body: Slaves and Castas in the Hospital de San Bartolomé in Lima, 1680 to 1700

Abstract

“A machine which does not serve the purpose of labor is useless. So a slave who becomes equated with a machine is useless when some component part no longer works.” (Karl Marx,Manuscripts, 459)“Verás de abanzada edadA muchos bozales negrosQue al público pensionandoEstán después que sirvieron.”For years after the 1687 earthquake had devastated much of Lima, various published sermons pondered the significance of the inauspicious event. One specific panegyric written in 1694 detailed the structural damage to the Hospital of San Bartolomé, founded in 1661 for “freed, disabled, ill or elderly blacks.” In the baroque literary style characteristic of the period, the author, Francisco de Vargas Machuca, described how the heroic viceroy Laso de Portocarrero, the Count of Monclova, “born like the sun for the remedy of all,” exercised his “divine charity” toward the poor of the Royal hospital, and “bore the weight of its ruins upon his own majestic shoulders to attend to the poor slaves and their hospital at his own expense.” According to the author, only Christ himself could have predicted that in 1694 the viceroy would refurbish the vestibule with exquisitely adorned doors, place “costly stones of the court” in the portal and replace the damaged cornices with more ornate ones in order to replicate a “hospital of heaven where the poor would enter.” After four months of intensive labor, the wards, in the shape of a Greek cross, were restored and the roofing and masonry work completed. Ample food, bedding and medicine once again provided adequate sustenance for the poor, infirm and elderly slaves and free castas in the hospital.