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The Indians have built many almshouses where they care for the sick and the poor, for out of their own poverty [charity] they provide abundantly for them. As there are many Indians, even though they give very little “many littles make a mickle,” and all the more if the giving is continuous, so that the hospitals are well provided for. Since they know how to serve as if they were born to it, they lack nothing; and from time to time they go through the whole province in search of sick people. They have their own doctors, experienced natives who know how to apply many herbs and medicines, and this suffices for them. Some of these doctors are so experienced that they have cured many serious and long-standing illnesses which Spaniards had suffered for many days without finding a remedy.”

What is not fully understood is that the original American culture did not collapse in the face of European superiority. It was from the European diseases. The ensuing plagues killed an estimated 90% of the population. After which, slave labor, starvation and slaughter reduced what was left by another 50%. The official estimate is as high as 100 million Indian deaths directly attributed to European ethnic cleansing of the Americas. The depopulation was so complete, slave labor from Africa and Asia was brought in to fill the vacuum. Historian Charles Gibson states: “In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries it was common to speak of a total decrease of 90 percent or more in the Aztec population in the intervening years since the Conquest. This decrease was due largely to smallpox and other epidemics.”
  
When Europe rushed in to the American continent its people brought blight and offensiveness. These gold-hungry invaders were unclean and diseased, causing an American "Black Death." The native way of life that had developed over many millennium was consumed and eliminated, leaving the people with filth where there had once been purity. According to Motolina:
 
“... At this time New Spain was extremely full of people, and when the smallpox began to attack the Indians it became so great a pestilence among them throughout the land that in most provinces more than half the population died …Only He who counts the drops of rain and the sands of the sea can number the dead …And, the thirst of their greed unslaked, the Spaniard went on to discover the innumerable islands of the Lucayas and Mayaguana - which they said were mines of gold, with very fine looking and intelligent inhabitants and friendly Indians - and all the coast of the mainland, killing so very many souls...’
“...Their suffering, afflictions and toil reached their climax on the third year of the square [of the Reed], when the Spaniards slew innumerable people, and the pox and a famine ravished the land. I have heard old men tell how a handful of corn was exchanged for another of gold or of stones. I could tell about many other things and set down in my writings other occurences which before and after have taken place. But the one I have narrated set the seal upon the misery of the Indians.”  He goes on further:  “More potent was the avarice of our Spaniards to destroy and depopulate this land than all  the-sacrifices and wars and assassinations that took place in its pagan days, even counting all those who were sacrificed everywhere - and there were numerous.
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