Jesus (still) saves… Hospital de Jesús

I image leeches and wolfsbane aren’t in the pharmacy, but with 500 years in operation (and performing operations9, Mexico City’s Hospital de Jesús is still in the same business — and on the same site –providing medical care to all social classes, regardless of ability to pay, since 1524.

Hernan Cortés wasn’t exactly the kind of person who ever said “sorry”., but like other medieval warlords had that nagging sense that he was headed for the bad place, and had a rather transactional relationship with his maker. Not that he saw anything wrong with mass murder in the pursuit of bringing people to Jesus (and making himself rich), but that it being “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle”, maybe sharing a bit of the loot with Jesus might ease the way.

Whatever it was that Cortés was thinking — perhaps just that sick and dying “indios” and wounded conquistadors needed taken somwhere — he did finance what was a “multi-service” general hospital. By multi-service, i don’t just mean medical care — or what passed for medical care at the time — but preparing you for the next life. The complex still includes a church… and where Cortés¿ remains were meant to go when he died the richest man in the Spanish empire in 1547, and did… although it was quite a while — like 400 years –before that was the happen.

The Hospital — financed through a kind of Cortés family trust for the first 300 years — survived somehow, updated and expanded in the 17th century after the 1624 floods that left the entire city underwater for two years, and after 1824 through private donations. it was expanded again in the 1960s, with a new and frankly boring modern wing although… having always depended on donations and taking in all patients regarless of ability to pay, it is now strapped for money, and the oldest hospital in the Americas (and second oldest continuously functioning hopital in the world, faces an uncertain future.