{
  "id": "fragoso-discursos-de-las-cosas-aromaticas-1572",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Juan Fragoso, Discursos de las cosas aromáticas (Madrid, 1572)",
  "summary": "A royal physician's book on the drugs of the East Indies whose title misdescribes it. The American materia medica keeps breaking into chapters named for Asian drugs — guayacán inside the chapter on China root, the Peruvian sunflower inside asafoetida, tobacco inside bangue — making the 1572 Madrid printing an early comparative pharmacopoeia of the two Indies. It also prints one of the plainer sixteenth-century sentences about what enslaved people in the Indies used tobacco for.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "medicine",
    "botany",
    "pharmacy",
    "americas",
    "asia",
    "madrid",
    "print",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "columbian-exchange",
    "trade"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "monardes-historia-medicinal-1580"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "guayaco-palo-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "zarzaparrilla-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tabaco-picietl-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "medicinal-plant-trade-from-spanish-america-1717-1815"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "columbian-exchange"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is Juan Fragoso's Discursos de las cosas aromáticas?",
    "Did Spanish drug books of the sixteenth century treat Asian and American medicines together?",
    "What does Fragoso say about the guayacán and about sarsaparilla?",
    "Where does the first Spanish description of the sunflower appear?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page reads \"DISCVRSOS DE LAS COSAS Aromaticas, arboles y frutales, y de otras muchas medicinas simples que se traen de la India Oriental, y siruen al vso de medicina\", by \"EL LICENCIADO Iuan Fragoso medico, y cyrugiano de su Magestad\", printed \"CON PRIVILEGIO. Impresso en Madrid en casa de Francisco Sanchez. Año. 1572\", and sold \"en casa de Sebastian Yuañez librero en Corte\". The printer's device carries the motto \"SOLO EN DIOS Y PARA DIOS\". The author is styled physician and surgeon to the king.",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The title promises the East Indies and the book delivers the West as well. In the chapter whose running head is \"DE LA CHYNA\", Fragoso turns aside: \"No sera razon oluidar en este proposito aquel leño (cuyo vso y memoria se obscurecio con la çarça parrilla) llamado entre nuestros Indios Guayaco y Guayacan: y acerca de los Españoles Palo de las Indias, el qual se hallo enel primer descubrimiento, que fue en la isla de Sancto Domingo, adonde ay abundancia dello\". He gives its size — as tall as an ash, at most as thick as a man's body — and its broad, short, tough leaves.",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "That passage also records, in 1572 and from inside the trade, that one American drug had displaced another: the guayacán's \"vso y memoria se obscurecio con la çarça parrilla\". The eclipse is stated as a fact about practice, not lamented, and it dates the changeover to before the book went to press.",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same pattern governs the sunflower. Inside the chapter whose running head is \"DEL ASSAFETIDA\", Fragoso closes the discussion of that Asian resin and then writes that \"por el qual effecto, y por la semejança có el tallo y su resina, viene muy a cuenta, hazer alguna mencion, de vna famosa yerua de Peru\" — with the marginal tag \"Flor dl Sol\". The American plant enters the book as a comparison to an Asian one; the organising principle is the drug's properties, not its hemisphere.",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Tobacco enters the book the same way, and this is the third instance of the pattern: it is introduced inside the chapter whose running head is \"DEL BANGVE\", the Asian hemp preparation, as the American drug that does the same thing. \"En muchas partes de nuestras Indias se halla vna yerua llamada Tabaco y Picielt entre aquella gente para el mismo efecto que dicho es: porque como vn Indio se sienta cansado, tomando el humo por vn cañuto, queda borracho y como muerto por algunas horas: y passada la fuerça de la yerua, recuerda tan sin cansancio, como si por el no vuiera passado trabajo, y recuperado con dobladas fuerças.\" Fragoso then reports it as the herb \"tan celebrada de los sacerdotes de aquellas naciones\", taken through a cane by the priest until he lay as if dead, in powder when the leaf was wanting, so that answers about war and weather might be given — leaving open, in the same sentence, whether the visions came \"o por virtud dela yerua, o haziendolo el demonio\".",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The cost is printed in the middle of that passage and should not be read past. Having described the recovery of strength that tobacco gave, Fragoso continues: \"Conforme a lo qual algunos negros de las Indias, toman estos humazos para no sentir los açotes y tormentos que les dan.\" Enslaved Africans in the Indies are recorded, in a Madrid drug book of 1572, using the smoke to blunt the pain of the whippings inflicted on them. The sentence is offered by its author as evidence of the herb's power; it is also, and more durably, evidence of what was being done to the people who used it, and it stands in this object for that reason.",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "What this object does not claim. Nothing here says Fragoso crossed either ocean or saw these plants growing in the Indies; the book describes drugs as they reached Spain, and for the sunflower he writes \"segun lo que se ha visto\" of a plant being grown in Spain. Nothing is claimed about the accuracy of his therapeutics, and his account of indigenous priests is a hostile European report of a religious practice, not a description this corpus endorses. Four chapters out of a 492-page volume were opened, so the characterisation above rests on those chapters and on the volume's own index, not on a reading of the whole book — and the claim that the pattern is general is offered at the confidence stated, not as a settled description of the work.",
      "sources": [
        "fragoso-discursos-cosas-aromaticas-1572"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Fragoso's Discursos is catalogued everywhere by its title — a book about the drugs of the East Indies — and that is how the reference literature passes it on, which is why it is almost never cited in accounts of the American drug trade. Reading it on the page shows the title to be a poor description of the contents: the guayacán arrives inside the chapter on China root, the sunflower inside the chapter on asafoetida, tobacco inside the chapter on bangue, each brought in because it resembles or displaces an Asian drug. That structural fact is the contribution here, and it comes with the running heads checked — the trap in this volume is that a page found by search will look like a chapter on the American plant when it is a digression inside a chapter on an Asian one. The object also lifts out a sentence that summaries of this book never carry, on enslaved Africans taking tobacco smoke against the pain of the lash, and prints it next to the therapeutic praise rather than instead of it.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-16",
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    "name": "Juan Fragoso, Discursos de las cosas aromáticas (Madrid, 1572)",
    "description": "A royal physician's book on the drugs of the East Indies whose title misdescribes it. The American materia medica keeps breaking into chapters named for Asian drugs — guayacán inside the chapter on China root, the Peruvian sunflower inside asafoetida, tobacco inside bangue — making the 1572 Madrid printing an early comparative pharmacopoeia of the two Indies. It also prints one of the plainer sixteenth-century sentences about what enslaved people in the Indies used tobacco for.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/fragoso-discursos-de-las-cosas-aromaticas-1572",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-16",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Discursos de las cosas aromaticas, arboles y frutales, y de otras muchas medicinas simples que se traen de la India Oriental, y siruen al vso de medicina",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=NkBpAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP13"
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    "headline": "Juan Fragoso, Discursos de las cosas aromáticas (Madrid, 1572)"
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