Transatlantic Trade and Global Cultural Transfers Since 1492

More than Commodities

Martina Kaller, Frank Jacob, Martina Kaller, Frank Jacob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429763571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Access to new plants and consumer goods such as sugar, tobacco, and chocolate from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards would massively change the way people lived, especially in how and what they consumed. While global markets were consequently formed and provided access to these new commodities that increasingly became important in the 'Old World', especially with regard to the establishment early modern consumer societies. This book brings together specialists from a range of historical fields to analyse the establishment of these commodity chains from the Americas to Europe as well as their cultural implications.

Section III

Knowledge and representation

6 Peyote and ololiuhqui in the medical texts of New Spain and their circulation in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries

Angélica Morales-Sarabia

Introduction

The starting point of this essay was to gauge the impact of American medicinal plants in Europe, particularly Spain, in the 16th and 17th centuries. A difficulty immediately arises from the European side once the question is posed: how to assess the incorporation of plants, animals and minerals with medicinal properties in Spain, setting out from the medical and surgical texts printed in New Spain?

For a long time, it was held true that a market for raw materials of vegetable, animal or mineral origin from New Spain to the Iberian Peninsula was established in the 16th century. In this context, medicinal plants played a key role. Initially, historians of medicine considered this thesis confirmed in the works of Nicolás Monardes (ca. 1493–1588) and Francisco Hernández (ca. 1515–1587). These were the authors who conveyed most of what was known at the time about medicinal plants from New Spain, and both fully agreed on the contribution that these plants could make to medicine in the Old World.¹ At the end of the 16th century, ideas of and manuscripts by Hernández and Monardes had a strong impact on the Anglo-Saxon world and the Netherlands, and gained recognition as authoritative sources on that subject. However, there were other Spanish physicians and surgeons who provided information about medicinal plants early on, whether at first or second hand, e.g. Andrés Laguna (ca. 1510–1559), Juan Fragoso (1530–1597) and Juan Calvo (1536–1599). To different degrees, they applied the American materia medica in their therapeutic practices.² Others were more prudent, such as the prominent pharmacist Luis de Oviedo, who only barely mentioned American medical plants in his Methodo de la colección de resposicion de las medicinas simples, y de su corrrecion y preparación.³

The thesis of a wide circulation of medicinal plants in this period is owed to the paradigmatic cases of chocolate and tobacco, whose strong impact in Europe was supported by solid arguments. However today we know that medicinal plants did not always follow commercial routes⁴ and their integration into Spanish materia medica during the 16th and 17th centuries were by no means as significant as has been supposed. This is particularly the case if, as some have argued, the revenues derived from medicinal plants were insignificant in comparison to those from cochineal, pelts and later sugar.⁵

Therefore, it is worth scrutinizing some of the failed or minor prominent cases in this circulation because they provide us with information regarding the impact of resources from New Spain on European medicine, and also on New Spanish colonial medicine in general. The impact of colonial on Spanish medicine will be demonstrated for two plants: the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii (Lem.) Coult.)⁶ and ololiuhqui (Turbina corymbosa [L] Raf.), one of the over 1,000 species of Morning Glory.⁷ Under the theoretical axiom of Galenic medicine, these plants were classified as medicinal. Both were known to provoke a kind of intoxication similar to the symptoms of intoxication under the effect of alcohol, causing a temporary loss of judgement.⁸

Between 1570 and 1727, medical knowledge produced in New Spain from the 16th century onwards was partly included into printed works on medicine and surgery in New Spain. In some cases, these books circulated in Spain in their original editions or, more rarely, in European publications. This is a proof of the pluralism that characterized the colonial system.⁹

There is evidence that the perception of certain medicinal plants slips through our fingers because, although they were recognized by physicians and surgeons in New Spain, they failed to cross the Atlantic. However, some plants used by native women to alleviate menstrual pain, strengthen the hip bones or accelerate the onset of childbirth (cihuapatli Montanoa tomentosa Cerv., a member of the daisy family; tlalquequetzal – yarrow – Achillea millefolium L.; tlilxochitl Vanilla planifolia) attracted attention among Spanish physicians.¹⁰ This suggests that what was at stake in the transfer of medical resources and knowledge cannot be explained solely by the medical virtues of the plants or their potential economic benefits. There were features of appropriation prior to their commercial success that conditioned the circulation of these resources and often go unnoticed in analyses based on approaches characterized by economic, biological or cultural functionalism.

In her study of chocolate, Marcy Norton discovered that Spanish settlers (merchants, physicians, members of religious orders, women, etc.) had strongly internalized Mesoamerican aesthetics related to chocolate that implies an opposite movement from the periphery to the metropolis.¹¹ The Spaniards who returned home assumed that many of their experiences were comparable to what was known in the Old World, while others, such as the taste for chocolate, were completely new.¹²

A publishing market on the way up: New Spanish medical texts and their European perception

When studying processes of circulation and appropriation of American medicinal plants in Spain, it is important to pay attention to the impact of the Iberian globalization of the 16th century.

The Hispano-American presses of the 16th and 17th centuries attracted the attention of printers and translators in northern Europe, who augmented their catalogues with titles in vernacular languages and in Latin.¹³ Iberian globalization generated a synergy involving not only the New World scholars, but also Dutch, French and English writers.¹⁴ Thus, the American nature, as it was called, increasingly drew the attention of the scientific community. From the 17th century onward, theories of humidity, immaturity or stunted growth became part of the image, which in the following century would turn into the inferiority discourse related to the Americas.¹⁵

Between 1570 and 1712, a series of medicinal books were published in New Spain that included indigenous practices and therapeutic resources in varying degrees of profundity. Although they all belonged to the field of medicine and surgery, the genre in which they were conceived was different. Of the books printed in New Spain in this period, some were identified as “books of secrets,” like the Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las indias by Juan de Cárdenas (1591);¹⁶ others were considered practical manuals, such as the Suma y recopilación de cirugía con un arte para sangrar muy útil y provechosa by Alonso López de Hinojosos (1578, 1595) – a volume widely used in New Spain – and the surgical and medical book Tratado breve de medicina y de todas las enfermedades by Agustín Farfán (1592, 1610).¹⁷ Both the book by López de los Hinojosos (1535–1597) and the one by Agustín Farfán (1532–1604) constitute part of the strategies of Jesuit and Augustinian missionaries to deal with health problems of their religious communities and the nearby population in general. Another equally remarkable book was the translation from Latin into Spanish by Francisco Ximénez, a text written by Francisco Hernández (1515–1587) and published in 1615. It was popular in New Spain and some parts of Europe. The same applies to Juan de Barrio’s Verdadera medicina, cirugía y astrología (1607) and, in a separate category, the apocryphal text by Gregorio López, Tesoro de medicinas para diversas enfermedades (1672, 1674, 1708, 1727).¹⁸ The latter was a book about American remedies, which had a remarkable impact in New Spain and Spain alike. It was used to promote the beatification of its author and – perhaps for that reason – has been less appreciated for its medicinal originality.

The fame acquired by the works of López de los Hinojosos, Agustín Farfán, Francisco Ximénez and Gregorio López was perhaps outstripped only by the Florilegio Medicinal de todas las enfermedades of Juan de Esteyneffer (1664–1716). Originally published in New Spain in 1712, this work of Jesuit medicine went through successive editions in Amsterdam (1719), Madrid (1729 and 1755) and Mexico (1887). It was so important that it is even mentioned in use by the Jesuit missions in the general Captaincy of Chile.¹⁹

José Pardo- Tomás demonstrated the utility of the concept of “conversion medicine” to characterize the coordinates of the content and purpose of these books: the resolution of physical and spiritual infirmities.²⁰ The New Spanish books on medicine and surgery enabled the religious orders to tackle acute health problems by funding, promoting and circulating works of this kind, mainly written by laymen who at some point in their lives decided to join one of these religious orders.

Medical books were published in New Spain before and after the period of 1570–1712, but many texts – among them the ones mentioned previously – integrated indigenous medical information to varying degrees, whether as substitutes or deriving from their own therapeutic properties, that attracted the attention of Spanish physicians and surgeons.²¹

Peyote and ololiuhqui seeds consequently did not travel as botanical specimens, but as part of prescriptions. Medical texts of the period promoted these plants as medicinal for a short period of time; even when they reached readers in the Peninsula, little could be apprised of their cultural relevance “at home.” These plants clearly demonstrate the areas of light and shadow in the medical pluralism of the 16th and 17th centuries. Its identity was formed on the basis of permanent negotiations between the inhabitants of New Spain, who had to cope with the scarcity of physicians, pharmacists and medications in the face of the availability of indigenous resources and therapeutic practices.²²

The prescriptions preserve under a certain form the textualization of the indigenous medical tradition;²³ an orality that appears as a concession, perhaps the result of some informal conversation or in some hospital or convent. It should be recalled that physicians were not obliged to mention their informants.²⁴ The contradictions inherent in translation, transfer or exchange are never completely resolved. The recovery of indigenous medicine in these texts tends to be plagued by disputes of a different kind (symbolic, religious or medical).²⁵ This is why the processes of appropriation of the indigenous medicinal practic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: commodity trade, globalization, and the making of the Atlantic World
• Section I Changing food habits
• Section II New consumer societies
• Section III Knowledge and representation
• Index