{
  "id": "bravo-opera-medicinalia-1570",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Opera medicinalia (Mexico, 1570)",
  "summary": "The first medical book printed anywhere in the Americas, from the press of Pedro Ocharte at Mexico in 1570. Its four parts treat the fever the country called tabardete, bleeding in pleurisy, critical days, and the root known as zarzaparrilla. The second is an argument against a named Seville authority, which makes the first medical imprint of the New World a book that disputes the Old.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "medicine",
    "printing",
    "books",
    "new-spain",
    "botany",
    "science",
    "spanish-empire"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "laguna-dioscorides-anazarbeo-1555"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "first-printing-press-americas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quatro-libros-de-la-naturaleza-1615"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hospitals-of-the-indies"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "universities-of-lima-and-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "quina-cascarilla-del-peru"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diez-sumario-compendioso-1556"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cardenas-problemas-y-secretos-1591"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "farfan-tractado-brebe-de-medicina-1592"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hidalgo-de-aguero-thesoro-de-la-verdadera-cirugia"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "arias-de-benavides-secretos-de-chirurgia-1567"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the first medical book printed in the Americas?",
    "What is Francisco Bravo's Opera medicinalia of 1570?",
    "What did sixteenth-century physicians in Mexico write about?",
    "Who printed the first medical book in the New World?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The book stands as entry 57, under the year 1570, of Joaquín García Icazbalceta's catalogue of Mexican imprints. He transcribes the title, set within an engraved portico: \"OPERA MEdicinalia in qbus q̃ plurima extant scitu medico necessaria in 4. li. digesta, quę pagina versa cōtinentur. Authore Francisco Brauo Orsunēsi doctore ac Mexicano medico\", with the imprint below the engraving, \"Mexici, apud Petrum Ocharte. Cum priuilegio. 1570.\" The volume is an octavo in gothic type, its title page in roman.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Icazbalceta states the primacy with the limits attached: since Pedrarias de Benavides printed his book in Spain, \"cabe hasta ahora al Dr. Francisco Bravo la honra de haber sido el primero que publicó en México un libro de medicina\". The honour claimed is of first publication in Mexico, is bounded by \"hasta ahora\", and belongs to the place of printing rather than to authorship about American medicine.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The counterpoint is on the same pages, and it is a substantial one. Doctor Pedrarias de Benavides, who says he had charge for eight years of a hospital in Mexico \"en que se cura de la enfermedad del morbo gálico, más que en toda España\", printed at Valladolid in 1567 — three years earlier — his \"Secretos de Chirurgía, especial de las enfermedades de Morbo gálico, y Lamparones, y Mirrarchia, y [...] la manera cómo se curan los indios, de llagas y heridas y otras passiones, en las Indias\". American medical experience reached print before 1570; what 1570 marks is the first time it was set in type in America.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The contents are announced on the verso of the title and transcribed by Icazbalceta. The first book treats the whole doctrine of the disease \"imanis morbi (tauardete vulgo dicti)\" which rages popularly through this Mexican province, setting out its nature, causes, signs and symptoms and proposing its remedy; the third treats the doctrine of critical days, expounding the mind of Hippocrates and Galen and offering \"noua quędam et uerissima, hactenusq̃ a nullo agitata opinio\".",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The second book is a dispute, and the title page says so before the reader opens it: a dialogue on venesection in pleurisy and all inflammations of the body, \"in quo cuiusdam medici hispalensis placita d hac sentētia obliterātur\", the true doctrine of Galen and the other Greeks being expounded in its place. Icazbalceta identifies the Sevillian physician whose opinion is struck out as Doctor Nicolás Monardes, author of the \"Historia Medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales\" and of a treatise on bleeding in pleurisy addressed to the physicians of Seville.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The fourth book is on an American drug: the little root \"quę uulgo çarçaparrilla\" and its proper effects, with a discussion of the diseases in which it is expedient to use it. The first medical volume printed in the Americas closes on the plant matter of the country rather than on the classical pharmacopoeia.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The book was made entirely inside New Spain's own learned world. Leaf 2 carries the author's dedication to the viceroy Don Martín Enríquez; there follows an epistle by Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, two Latin distichs by Melchor Téllez in praise of the viceroy, seven more in praise of the author and seven in praise of medicine; between the books stand Latin epigrams addressed to Bravo by the bachiller Enrique Tovares, \"chyrurgus mexicanus\"; and book three opens with an epistle to Ludovico Villanueva, doctor of civil law and \"hujus Novi Imperii Senatori\". The colophon reads \"Ad laudem saluatoris nostri Jesu Christi, z gloriosissimę christiparę uirginis Mariæ: finitum fuit hoc opus Mexici in ædibus Petri Ocharte\".",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The engraved portico around the title is the same block used for Cervantes de Salazar's Diálogos, and carries the date 1549 cut into the piece itself. On the strength of that date Henry Harrisse included the book in his Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima, which covers works about America published from 1493 to 1550, while expressing grave doubts in the same place, the book being dedicated to viceroy Enríquez, whose government ran from 1568 to 1580. A young press reusing one woodcut set a trap that caught the best bibliographer of the Americana.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "Almost nothing is known of the author, and the source says so outright. Icazbalceta reports that his efforts to obtain biographical notices of Bravo were vain: it is known only from his own book that he was a native of Osuna, and that in 1553, when he was beginning to practise, he observed an epidemic at Seville. That he wrote the Opera medicinalia in Mexico is given as inference — \"parece que aquí escribió la obra\" — not as fact.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The first medical book of the Americas survives in mutilated copies. The copy Harrisse described, belonging to the New York collector James Lenox, lacked the colophon leaf, and the date had been cut out of the title page by one of the book's owners; Icazbalceta could give the full collation only after Sancho Rayón sent him from Madrid a description of a complete copy, with photolithographs of the title, the colophon and the preliminary page that states the contents.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The 1570 imprint was not an isolated curiosity. Icazbalceta records that Alonso López de Hinojosos published at Mexico in 1578 and again in 1595 two editions of a Suma y Recopilación de Cirugía — its eighth book treating tabardillo and cocolixtli — and that Agustín Farfán, \"primer mexicano que imprimió obra de esta materia\", gave his Tratado breve de Medicina in 1579, reprinted in 1592, 1604 and 1610, a repetition Icazbalceta reads as evidence of the regard in which it was held. Medical printing in Mexico became a standing trade within a decade.",
      "sources": [
        "icazbalceta-bibliografia-mexicana-1886"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Coverage of the Opera medicinalia rarely gets past the label \"first medical book printed in America\" — no contents, no argument, no qualification. This object gives the contents from the transcribed title verso, names the Seville authority the second book was written to refute, records the American root treated in the fourth, and prints the colophon and the Mexican dedications and epigrams that show where the book was made. It also states plainly what the label conceals: a physician who had worked in a Mexico City hospital had printed on American practice in Spain three years earlier, the biography of Bravo is unrecoverable, the woodcut misled Harrisse into dating it 1549, and the surviving copies are defective.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-11",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/bravo-opera-medicinalia-1570",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/bravo-opera-medicinalia-1570.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Opera medicinalia (Mexico, 1570)",
    "description": "The first medical book printed anywhere in the Americas, from the press of Pedro Ocharte at Mexico in 1570. Its four parts treat the fever the country called tabardete, bleeding in pleurisy, critical days, and the root known as zarzaparrilla. The second is an argument against a named Seville authority, which makes the first medical imprint of the New World a book that disputes the Old.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/bravo-opera-medicinalia-1570",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-11",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI. Primera parte. Catálogo razonado de libros impresos en México de 1539 á 1600, con biografías de autores y otras ilustraciones, precedido de una noticia acerca de la introducción de la imprenta en México",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=cr0TAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA64"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Opera medicinalia (Mexico, 1570)"
  }
}