INTRODUCTION

America's conquest by Spaniards – la Conquista – took more than six decades, from discovery in 1492 to the execution of the Araucanian rebel, cacique Caupolicán, in 1557. During this period, the Spanish engaged in a political and legal debate over the status of new lands as property, which was accompanied by a philosophical and theological debate over the justification of war to take Spanish possession of the territories and the moral status of the indigenous population. Overlaying this was an even more sophisticated argument about the ontological reasons concerning whether indigenous peoples had dominion over themselves and, thus, were not to be enslaved. These discussions occurred contemporaneously with two devastating events, the radical and rapid depopulation of indigenous peoples in the Americas known as the “Americas’ demographic catastrophe,” and the near simultaneous depopulation of many African tribes as their people were enslaved to facilitate the economic exploitation of the “New World.” After their military and political conquest of Latin America, with its maleficent consequences, the Spaniards introduced sanitary measures and hospital developments to provide health services to the population as an expression of the Christian virtue of charity. Spanish colonialism in Latin America emerged from the conquest and is a complex social and moral phenomenon.

During the nineteenth century, European intellectual influence changed colonial medical ethics, as Latin American physicians, emulating the unification of medical art with the scientific experimental method practiced in Britain, France, and Germany, found a new source of intellectual and moral authority.