Introduction

In the year 1737, as an epidemic raged in and around Mexico City, its inhabitants carried out desperate acts of devotion to a number of holy images in a series of unsuccessful attempts to halt the disease’s mortal progression. Finally, after the city formally declared the Virgin of Guadalupe as its official patron, the epidemic subsided. Recounting this miraculous turn of events in his four-volume Historia de la Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de Nueva España (1767; Mexico, 1841–1842), Francisco Javier Alegre (1729–1788), a Jesuit himself and the acclaimed historian of the Order, observed that it appeared the exterminating angel was only waiting for the declaration of patronage in order to sheath his sword (Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe 86; see also Deck, Francisco Javier Alegre). Jacques Lafaye points to this moment as the occasion for the “belated flowering for the Guadalupe cult,” two centuries after its apparition, a flowering he relates to incipient Mexican national consciousness and, more generally, to a period of creole triumphalism in the early 1700s. Even discounting these later developments, Alegre’s account preserves for us a striking example of colonial hagiolatry.

Almost half a century later, in 1779, a smallpox epidemic was declared in Mexico City. Dr. José Ignacio Bartolache (1739–1790), who had edited the Mercurio Volante (which some consider to be America’s first medical journal) during its brief appearance from 1772 to 1773, presented to the viceroy a plan for combatting the disease. Although Bartolache’s text has unfortunately been lost, his recommendations were preserved in the Cabildo’s official approval of the plan.