Pandemic in Potosí

Watch “PSU Press Presents: Latin American Originals,” a virtual author event hosted by the Press on February 16th, 2022 with Peter Hess, Kris Lane, Andrea Martínez Baracs, and series editor Matthew Restall:

In 1719, a deadly and highly contagious disease took hold of the Imperial Villa of Potosí, a silver mining metropolis in what is now Bolivia. Within a year, the pathogen had killed some 22,000 people, just over a third of the city’s residents. Victims collapsed with fever, body aches, and effusions of blood from the nose and mouth. Most died within days. The great Andean pandemic of 1717–22 was likely the most destructive disease to strike South America since the days of the Spanish conquest.

Pandemic in Potosí features the single longest narrative of this nearly forgotten period, penned by local historian Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, along with shorter treatments of the disease’s ravages in Cuzco, Arequipa, and the outskirts of Lima. The “Gran Peste,” as it was called, was a pivotal event about which Arzáns wrote at length because he lived through it, but also because it was believed to have cosmic significance. Kris Lane translates and contextualizes Arzáns’s account, which is rich in local detail that sheds light on a range of topics—from therapeutics, devotional life, class relations, gender, and race to conceptions of illness, sin, and human will and responsibility during a major public health crisis.

Original narratives of the pandemic, translated here for the first time, help readers see commonalities and differences between past and present disease encounters. Designed for use in courses on Latin American history, this concise work will also interest scholars and students of the history of religion, history of medicine, urban studies, and epidemiology.

“In making available documents, perspectives, and voices from the past, Pandemic in Potosí joins a growing but regrettably short list of thematic sourcebooks aimed at students, teachers, and researchers [alike]. In focusing on one particular crisis, it demonstrates the value of episodic study for deep historical understanding. There are lessons here for all of us.”—Paul Ramírez, author of Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason

“This book provides something of interest for scholars and experts, and uses the lens of a pandemic, a cultural touchstone for the current generation of students, to introduce them to eighteenth-century Potosí.”—Mark P. Dries, Hispanic American Historical Review

“Exceedingly relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pandemic in Potosí is an erudite primary source translation perfectly suited to classroom use.”—Aimee Hisey, H-LatAm

Kris Lane is France V. Scholes Professor of History at Tulane University. He is the author of several books, including Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World; Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500–1750; Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires; and Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition.

List of Illustrations

Map

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Pandemic in Potosí

2. Catastrophe in Cuzco

3. Apocalypse in Arequipa

4. Signs and Symptoms

5. The Cure

Bibliography

Index

History

           Eighteenth-century

           Latin American

Latin American Studies

           History

Religious Studies & Religion

           History of Religion