​Christina Ramos​

https://history.wustl.edu/xml/faculty_staff/11772/rss.xml
​Christina Ramos​

​Christina Ramos​

​Associate Professor of History
Director of Medical Humanities
PhD, Harvard University
MA, Duke University
BA, University of California - Davis

contact info:

office hours:

  • Mondays
    2:30 PM - 3:30 PM (office)
    Thursdays
    10:30 AM - 11:30 AM (Zoom - e-mail at address above to get link)
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mailing address:

  • MSC 1062-107-114
    Washington University
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Christina Ramos studies the history of medicine and public health through the lens of empire, religion, and colonial institutions.

Her research focuses on the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in the territories of the Spanish empire, exploring how medical knowledge, religious practice, and colonial authority converged to shape understandings of illness and the institutional forms devised to manage it. She examines hospitals as colonial spaces of both charity and coercion; the spiritual and medical labors of Catholic nursing orders; the Inquisition’s role as both a moral tribunal and a repository of medical testimony; and the lived experience of sickness, suffering, and care within colonial society.

Her first book, Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (UNC Press, 2022), examines madness and institutional care in colonial Mexico through the history of the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City—the first hospital in the Americas dedicated to the custody and care of the mentally disturbed. By probing the hospital’s deepening ties to the Inquisition and its entanglement with criminal courts, the book treats San Hipólito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of Enlightenment-era governance. It received several awards, including the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize (non-women and gender category), the Philip J. Pauly Prize, and the Cheiron Book Prize, among others.

Her current book project, Nursing an Empire: Hospitals and Global Health in the Hispanic World (working title), places nursing at the heart of early modern medical practice and colonial expansion. Focusing on Catholic nursing orders—especially the Order of San Juan de Dios—it explores how religious caregivers, mostly men bound by vows of chastity and service, provided medical care across a far-flung network of hospitals stretching from Granada to Manila. Far from peripheral, these nurses were key agents of empire, offering bodily care, spiritual discipline, and institutional leadership in hospitals that advanced both healing and colonial rule. The project foregrounds the gendered, embodied, and devotional labor that sustained early modern health regimes, while critically rethinking nursing itself—not as a timeless or feminized vocation, but as a historically contingent form of religious labor, moral authority, and imperial infrastructure. By tracing the circulation of caregivers, practices, and therapeutic ideals across the Spanish empire, the book reframes nursing as both a local act of compassion and a global tool of colonization and control.

She teaches widely on the history of medicine and colonial Latin America.

PUBLICATIONS

Books: 

Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2022).

A Cultural History of Madness in the Renaissance, co-edited with Elizabeth Mellyn (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming). 

Articles and Essays:

“Murderous and Negligent Nurses:  The Hospital Orders and the Crisis of Care in Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Review 33.1 (March 2024): 3-27. 

“Beyond the Columbian Exchange: Medicine and Public Health in Colonial Latin America,” History Compass 19.8 (Aug. 2021): 10-20.  

“Caring for pobres dementes: Madness, Colonization, and the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, 1567-1700,” The Americas 77.4 (Oct. 2020): 539-571.

Interviews:

https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/christina-ramos-bedlam-new-world-mexican-madhouse-age-enlightenment

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/christina-ramos-bedlam-in-the-new-world-a/id436024959?i=1000568414011 

Fellowships, Grants, & Awards:

Scholar Grant, Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2), Washington University in St. Louis, 2024-2025

Collaborative Grant for “Science in the Public Square,” Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures, Washington University in St. Louis, 2023-2024   

Faculty Fellowship, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis, 2020.

Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2018-2019.

José Amor y Vázquez Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, 2014

David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Harvard University, 2012-2013

Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, Harvard University, 2011-2012

Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Paleography, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Newberry Library, 2011

Hiebert Fellowship for Dissertation Research and Technical Training, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, 2010, 2011  

Term-Time Research Grant, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2010 

John Womack Jr. Summer Research Travel Grant, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2009 

Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship, National Academies of Sciences, 2008-2011

Duke Endowment Fellowship, Duke University, 2005-2006

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Humanistic Studies, 2004-2005
 

Courses:  

Health & Disease in World History

Humors, Pox, & Plague: Medieval and Early Modern Medicine

History of Madness

Medicine, Disease, and Empire

What is Medical Humanities? 

Introduction to Colonial Latin America

Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment

Bedlam in the New World: A Mexican Madhouse in the Age of Enlightenment

Faculty Fellow, Spring 2020

A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late eighteenth century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, the first hospital of the New World to specialize in the care and custody of the mentally disturbed.

Christina Ramos reconstructs the history of this overlooked colonial hospital from its origins in 1567 to its transformation in the eighteenth century, when it began to admit a growing number of patients transferred from the Inquisition and secular criminal courts. Drawing on the poignant voices of patients, doctors, friars, and inquisitors, Ramos treats San Hipólito as both a microcosm and a colonial laboratory of the Hispanic Enlightenment—a site where traditional Catholicism and rationalist models of madness mingled in surprising ways. She shows how the emerging ideals of order, utility, rationalism, and the public good came to reshape the institutional and medical management of madness. While the history of psychiatry’s beginnings has often been told as seated in Europe, Ramos proposes an alternative history of madness’s medicalization that centers colonial Mexico and places religious figures, including inquisitors, at the pioneering forefront.