Description

Official reports are dull until you notice what they contain. This one inventories the hospitals, foundling homes, asylums and poorhouses of Mexico under the early Porfiriato: how many beds, how many inmates, what each cost, who died. It was compiled to justify a budget, which is exactly why it does not flatter. Behind the columns is a picture of a state discovering that charity administered by religious orders was becoming a public service, and not yet knowing how to pay for it. A primary source for the social history of nineteenth-century Mexico, of a kind that rarely survives in usable form.