education of mestizo children, that is, of the mixed race who are now
called Creoles. In fact, in 1536 a fund from the Royal Exchequer was
given for the teaching of these children. Strange as it may seem, for
we are apt to think that the teaching of girls is a modern idea,
schools were also established for Indian girls. All of these schools
continued to flourish, and gradually spread beyond the City of Mexico
itself into the villages of the Indians. As a {310} matter of fact,
wherever a mission was established a school was also founded. Every
town, Indian as well as Spanish, was by law required to have its
church, hospital and school for teaching Indian children Spanish and
the elements of religion. The teaching and parish work in the Indian
villages was in charge of two or more friars, as a rule, and was well
done. The remains of the monasteries with their magnificent
Spanish-American architecture, are still to be seen in many portions
of Mexico and of the Spanish territories that have been incorporated
with the United States, in places where they might be least expected,
and they show the influence for culture and education that gradually
extended all over the Mexican country.
In the course of time the necessity for advanced teaching for the
constantly growing number of native whites began to be felt, and so
during the fifth decade of the sixteenth century a number of schools
for them came into existence in the City of Mexico. The need was felt
for some central institution. Accordingly, the Spanish Crown was
petitioned to establish authoritatively a university. Such a step
would have been utterly out of the question in English America,
because the Crown was so little interested in colonial affairs. In the
Spanish country, however, the Crown was deeply interested in making
the colonists feel that though they were at a distance from the centre
of government, their rulers were interested in {311} securing for
them, as far as possible, all the opportunities of life at home in
Spain. This is so different from what is ordinarily presumed to have
been the attitude of Spain towards its colonies as to be quite a
surprise for those who have depended on old-fashioned history, but
there can be no doubt of its truth. Accordingly, the University of
Mexico received its royal charter the same year as the University of
Lima (1551). Mexico was not formally organized as a university until
1553. In the light of these dates, it is rather amusing to have the
Century Dictionary, under the word Harvard University, speak of that
institution as the oldest and largest institution of learning in
America. It had been preceded by almost a century, not only in South
America, but also in North America. The importance of Harvard was as
nothing compared to the universities of Lima and Mexico, and indeed
for a century after its foundation Harvard was scarcely more than a
small theological school, with a hundred or so of pupils, sometimes
having no graduating class, practically never graduating more than
eight or ten pupils, while the two Spanish-American universities
counted their students by the thousand and their annual graduates by
the hundred.
The reason for the success of these South American universities above
that of Harvard is to be found in the fact that Harvard's sphere of
usefulness was extremely limited because of {312} religious
differences and shades of differences. This had hampered all education
in Protestant countries very seriously. Professor Paulsen, who holds
the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, calls attention
to the fact that the Reformation had anything but the effect of
favoring education that has often been said. The picture that he draws
of conditions in Germany a century before the foundation of Harvard
would serve very well as a lively prototype of the factors at work in
preventing Harvard from becoming such an educational institution as
the universities of Lima and Mexico so naturally became. He says, in
"German Universities and University Studies": "During this period
[after Luther's revolt] a more determined effort was made to control
instruction than at any period before or since. The fear of heresy,
the extraordinary anxiety to keep instruction well within orthodox
lines, was not less intense at the Lutheran than at the Catholic
institutions; perhaps it was even more so, because here doctrine was
not so well established, apostasy was possible in either of two
directions, toward Catholicism or Calvinism. Even the philosophic
faculty felt the pressure of this demand for correctness of doctrines.
Thus came about these restrictions within the petty states and their
narrow-minded established churches which well-nigh stifled the
intellectual life of the German people."
Because of this and the fact that the attendance {313} at the college
did not justify it, the school of medicine at Harvard was not opened
until after the Revolution (1783). The law school was not opened until
1817.
This is sometimes spoken of as the earliest law school connected with
a university on this continent, but, of course, only by those who know
nothing at all about the history of the Spanish-American
universities. In the Spanish countries the chairs in law were
established very early; indeed, before those of medicine. Canon law
was always an important subject in Spanish universities, and civil law
was so closely connected with it that it was never neglected.
When the charter of the University of Lima was granted by the Emperor
Charles V, in 1551, the town was scarcely more than fifteen years old.
It had been founded in 1535. Curiously enough, just about the same
interval had elapsed between the foundation of the Massachusetts
colony by the Pilgrims and the legal establishment of the college
afterward known as Harvard by the General Court of the colony. It is
evident that in both cases it was the needs of the rising generation
who had come to be from twelve to sixteen years of age that led to the
establishment of these institutions of higher education. The actual
foundation of Harvard did not come for two years later, and the
intention of the founders was not nearly so broad as that of the
founders of the University of Lima. Already at Lima schools had been
{314} established by the religious orders, and it was with the idea of
organizing the education as it was being given that the charter from
the Crown was obtained. With regard to both Lima and Mexico, within a
few years a bull of approval and confirmation was asked and obtained
from the Pope. The University of Lima continued to develop with
wonderful success. In the middle of the seventeenth century it had
more than a thousand students, at the beginning of the eighteenth it
had two thousand students, and there is no doubt at all of its
successful accomplishment of all that a university is supposed to do.
Juan Antonio Ribeyro, who was the rector of the University of Lima
forty years ago, said in the introduction to "The University Annals
for 1869" that, "It cannot be denied that the University of Peru
during its early history filled a large role of direct intervention
for the formation of laws, for the amelioration of customs and in
directing all the principal acts of civil and private society, forming
the religious beliefs, rendering them free from superstitions and
errors and influencing all the institutions of the country to the
common good." Certainly this is all that would be demanded of a
university as an influence for uplift, and the fact that such an ideal
should have been cherished shows how well the purpose of an
educational institution had been realized.
The scholarly work done by some of these professors at
Spanish-American universities still {315} remains a model of true
university work. It is the duty of the university to add to knowledge
as well as to disseminate it. That ideal of university existence is
supposed to be a creation of the nineteenth century, and indeed is
often said to have been brought into the history of education by the
example of the German universities. We find, however, that the
professors of the Spanish-American universities accomplished much in
this matter and that their works remain as precious storehouses of
information for after generations. Professor Bourne has given but a
short list of them in addition to those that have already been
mentioned, but even this furnishes an excellent idea of how much the
university professors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
Spanish America were taking to heart the duty of gathering, arranging
and classifying knowledge for after generations. They did more in the
sciences than in anything else. It is often thought that our knowledge
of the ethnology and anthropology of the Indians is entirely the
creation of recent investigators, but that is true only if one leaves
out of account the work of these old Spanish-American scholars.
Professor Bourne says:
"The most famous of the earlier Peruvian writers were Acosta, the
historian, the author of the 'Natural and Civil History of the
Indies'; the mestizo Garciasso de la Vega, who was educated in Spain
and wrote of the Inca Empire and De Soto's expedition; Sandoval, the
author of the {316} first work on Africa and the negro written in
America; Antonio Leon Pinelo, the first American bibliographer, and
one of the greatest as well of the indefatigable codifiers of the
old legislation of the Indies. Pinelo was born in Peru and educated
at the Jesuit College in Lima, but spent his literary life in
Spain."
Of the University of Mexico more details are available than of Peru,
and the fact that it was situated here in North America and that the
culture which it influenced has had its effect on certain portions of
the United States, has made it seem worth while to devote considerable
space to it. The University was called the Royal and Pontifical
University of Mexico, because, while it was founded under the charter
of the King of Spain, this had been confirmed by a bull from the Pope,
who took the new university directly under the patronage of the Holy
See. The reason for the foundation of the university, as the men at
that time saw it, is contained in the opening chapter of St. John's
Gospel, which is quoted as the preamble of the constitutions of the
university: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.
The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him
and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was Life, and
the Life was the light of men." This they considered ample reason for
the erection of a university and the spread of knowledge with God's
own sanction.
{317}
The patron saints of the university, as so declared by the first
article of the constitutions, were St. Paul the Apostle, and St.
Catherine the Martyr. Among the patrons, however, were also mentioned
in special manner two other saints--St. John Nepomucen, who died
rather than reveal the secrets of the confessional, and St. Aloysius
Gonzaga, the special patron of students. It is evident that these two
patrons had been chosen with a particular idea that devotion to them
would encourage the practice of such virtues and devotion to duty as
would be especially useful to the students, clerical and secular, of
the university. On all four of the feast days of these patrons the
university had a holiday. This would seem to be adding notably to the
number of free days in a modern university, but must have meant very
little at the University of Mexico, they had so many other free days.
The most striking difference between the calendar of the University of
Mexico and that of a modern university would be the number of days in
the year in which no lectures were given. There were some forty of
these altogether. Besides the four patron saint days, the feast day of
every Apostle was a holiday. Besides these, all the Fathers and
Doctors of the Church gave reasons for holidays. Then there was St.
Sebastian's Day, in order that young men might be brave, St. Joseph's
Day, the Annunciation, the Expectation, the Assumption and the
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the {318} Invention of the Holy Cross,
the Three Rogation Days and the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows.
Besides, there were St. Magdalen's, St. Ann's, St. Ignatius' and St.
Lawrence's Day. These were not all, but this will give an idea how
closely connected with the Church were the lectures at the university,
or, rather, the intermission from the lectures. It might be said that
this was a serious waste of precious time, and that our universities
in the modern time would not think of imitating them, but such a
remark could come but from some one who did not realize the real
condition that obtained in the old-time universities. At the present
time our universities finish their scholastic year about the middle of
May and do not begin again until October--nearly twenty weeks. At
these old universities their annual intermission between scholastic
years lasted only the six weeks from the Feast of the Nativity of the
Blessed Virgin, September 8, to St Luke's Day, October 18. They had
five weeks at Easter time and two weeks at Christmas time. They spread
their year out over a longer period and compensated for shorter
vacations by granting holidays during the year. Their year's labor was
less intense and spread out over more ground than ours.
The development of the University of Mexico into a real university in
the full sense of the old _studium generale_, in which all forms of
human knowledge might be pursued, is very interesting {319} and shows
the thoroughgoing determination of the Spanish Americans to make for
themselves and their children an institute of learning worthy of
themselves and their magnificent new country.
Chartered in 1551, it was not formally opened until 1553. Chairs were
established in this year in theology, Sacred Scripture, canon law and
decretals, laws, art, rhetoric and grammar. Both Spanish and Latin
were taught in the classes of grammar and rhetoric. To these was added
very shortly a chair in Mexican Indian languages, in accordance with
the special provisions of the imperial charter. The university
continued to develop and added further chairs and departments as time
went on. It had a chair of jurisprudence at the beginning, but its law
department was completed in 1569 by the addition of two other chairs,
one in the institutes of law, the other in codes of law. In the
meantime the university had begun to make itself felt as a corporate
body for general uplift by publications of various kinds. Its
professor of rhetoric, Dr. Cervantes Salazer, published in 1555 three
interesting Latin dialogues in imitation of Erasmus' dialogues. At the
moment Erasmus' "Colloquia" was the most admired academic work in the
university world of the time. The first of these dialogues described
the University of Mexico, and the other two, taking up Mexico City and
its environments, gave an excellent idea of {320} what the
Spanish-American capital of Mexico was three centuries and a half ago.
"The early promoters of education and missions did not rely upon the
distant European presses for the publication of their manuals. The
printing press was introduced into the New World probably as early
as 1536, and it seems likely that the first book, an elementary
Christian doctrine called 'La Escala Espiritual' (the ladder of the
spirit), was issued in 1537. No copy of it, however, is known to
exist. Seven different printers plied their craft in New Spain in
the sixteenth century. Among the notable issues of these presses,
besides the religious works and church service works, were
dictionaries and grammars of the Mexican languages, Puga's
'Cedulario' in 1563, a compilation of royal ordinances, Farfan's
'Tractado de Medicina.' In 1605 appeared the first text-book
published in America for instruction in Latin, a manual of poetics
with illustrative examples from heathen and Christian poets."
(Bourne.)
With the light thrown on the early history of printing on this
continent by a paragraph like this, how amusing it is to be told that
the tradition among the printers and the publishers and even the
bibliophiles of the United States is that the first book printed in
America was the Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book printed, I believe, in
1637. There were no less than seven printing presses at work in Mexico
during the sixteenth {321} century, fully fifty years before the
Massachusetts Bay Psalm Book was issued. How interesting it is for
those who still like to insist that the Catholic Church is opposed to
the distribution of the Scriptures to the people or its printing in
the vernacular, to find how many editions of it were printed in Mexico
and in South America during the sixteenth century. This story of the
printing press in Spanish America in the early days would of itself
make a most interesting chapter in a volume on American origins, which
could probably be extended into a very valuable little manual of
bibliography and bibliophilic information that would arouse new
interest in the accumulation of early American books.
The university had been founded just twenty-five years when provision
was made for the establishment of the medical department. According to
most of the chronicles the first chair in medicine was founded June
21, 1578, although there are some authorities who state that this
establishment came only in 1580. I am a graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School myself, and I yield to none of her sons in
veneration for my Alma Mater, but I cannot pass over this statement of
the foundation of the medical school in Mexico without recalling that
we have been rather proud at the University of Pennsylvania to be
known as the First American Medical School. This is, of course, only
due to our fond United States way of assuming {322} ourselves to be
all America and utterly neglecting any knowledge of Spanish America. I
believe that there are tablets erected at the University of
Pennsylvania chronicling our priority. One of them is to the first
graduating class, the other to the first faculty of the medical
school. I believe that between the erection of the two tablets there
had come to be some suspicion of the possibility that South America
was ahead of us in this respect and so the second tablet specifically
mentions North America. When I talked some time ago before the College
of Physicians of Philadelphia on this subject one of my friends, who
was a teacher at the university, asked me what they should do with
their tablets. I suggested that, by all means, they should be allowed
to remain, and that as soon as possible an opportunity should be
secured to erect the third tablet containing a statement of the real
facts with regard to the place of the University of Pennsylvania as
the protagonist in medicine in the United States. The tablets will
then serve to show the gradual evolution of our knowledge of the true
history of medical education in this country. It is all the more
important that this should be the arrangement because the University
of Pennsylvania has been a leader in "the discovery" of South America
that has been made by us in the last few years.
Between the date of the foundation of the first chair in medicine at
the beginning of the {323} last quarter of the sixteenth century and
the foundation of the city, Mexico had not been without provision of
physicians. In the very first year of the existence of the University
of Mexico, though there was no formal faculty of medicine, two doctors
received their degrees in medicine from the university. They had been
students in Spain and were able to satisfy the faculty of their
ability. This shows that the institution was considered to have the
power to confer these degrees upon those who brought evidence of
having completed the necessary studies, though it was not in a
position to provide facilities for these studies. It is evident that
this custom continued in subsequent years until the necessity for
medical studies at home became evident. The intimate connection
between the universities of old Spain and of New Spain is a very
interesting subject in the educational history of the time. Even
before the foundation of the university, however, definite efforts
were made by the authorities to secure proper medical service for the
colonists and to prevent their exploitation by quacks and charlatans.
Strict medical regulations were established by the Municipal Council
of the City of Mexico in 1527 so as to prevent quacks from Europe, who
might think to exploit the ills of the settlers in the new colony,
from practising medicine. Licenses to practise were issued only to
those who showed the possession of a university degree. {324} This
strict regulation of medical practice was extended also to the
apothecaries in 1529. Even before this, arrangements had been made for
the regular teaching of barber-surgeons, so that injuries and wounds
of various kinds might be treated properly, and so that emergencies
might be promptly met, even in the absence of a physician, by these
barber-surgeons. Dr. Bandelier, in his article on Francisco Bravo in
the second volume of the Catholic Encyclopedia, calls attention to
some important details with regard to medicine in Mexico in the early
part of the sixteenth century, and especially to this distinguished
physician who published the first book on medicine in that city in
1570.
Three years before that time Dr. Pedrarius de Benavides had published
his "Secretos de Chirurgia" at Valladolid, in Spain, a work which had
been written in America and contained an immense amount of knowledge
that is invaluable with regard to Indian medicinal practice. Dr.
Bravo's work, however, has the distinction of being the first medical
treatise printed in America.
The issuance of these books shows the intense interest in medicine in
the sixteenth century, but there are other details which serve to show
how thorough and practical were the efforts of the authorities in
securing the best possible medical practice. In 1524 there was founded
in the City of Mexico a hospital, which still stands and which was a
model in its way. That way was {325} much better than the mode of the
construction of hospitals in the eighteenth century, for instance,
when hospitals and care for the ailing reached the lowest ebb in
modern times. Other hospitals besides this foundation by Cortez soon
arose, and the wards of these hospitals were used for purposes of
clinical teaching. Clinical or bedside teaching in medicine is
supposed to be a comparatively recent feature of medical education.
There are traces of it, however, at all times in history and while at
times when theory ruled the practical application of observation
waned, it was constantly coming back whenever men took medical
education seriously. Its employment in Mexico seems to have been an
obvious development of their very practical methods, which began with
the teaching of first aid to the injured and developed through special
studies of the particular diseases of the country and of the methods
of curing them by native drugs.
A chair of botany existed already in connection with the university,
and this, with the lectures on medicine, constituted the medical
training until 1599, when a second medical lectureship was added.
During the course of the next twenty years altogether seven chairs in
medicine were founded, so that besides the two lectureships in
medicine there was a chair of anatomy and surgery, a special chair of
dissection, a chair of therapeutics, the special duty of which was to
lecture on Galen _"De Methodo Medendi,"_ a {326} chair of mathematics
and astrology, for the stars were supposed to influence human
constitutions by all the learned men of this time and even Kepler and
Galileo and Tycho-Brahe were within this decade making horoscopes for
important people in Europe, and, finally, a chair of prognostics. Most
of the teaching was founded on Hippocrates and Galen, and lest this
should seem sufficient to condemn it as hopelessly backward in the
minds of many, it may be recalled that during the century following
this time Sydenham, in England, and Boerhaave, in Holland, the most
distinguished medical men of their time and looked on with great
reverence by the teachers of ours, were both of them pleading for a
return to Hippocrates and Galen. As a matter of fact, the medical
school of the University of Mexico was furnishing quite as good a
medical training as the average medical school in Europe at that time,
at least so far as the subjects lectured on are concerned. Indeed, it
was modelled closely after the Spanish universities, which were
considered well up to the standard of the time.