Pedro López Pedro López was born around 1527 in Dueñas, Palencia, in Castile, where he studied medicine before traveling to New Spain. It's possible he reached the Americas around 1550, as in October 1553 he sat an exam to obtain the title of doctor in medicine, and became the first doctor to graduate from the Royal Pontifical University of Mexico. He was acknowledged during his lifetime as having been the doctor of Bernardino Álvarez, the founder of the Hippolytus Brotherhood and as doctor to the Dominicans, but above all for his founding of two hospitals: San Lázaro, founded in 1572 for the attention to lepers, and the Hospital for the Helpless, established ten years later with the aim of providing shelter to all those who could not be received in other hospitals: blacks, mulattos, half-castes, poor Spaniards and orphans. He died in Mexico City in the summer of 1597, in the San Lázaro Hospital.
-·Testamento del fundador Pedro López. AGN, “Tierras”. 3556 exp. IV. 1597.
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