Picietl into tabaco — how an American plant entered European medicine

The plant Nahuatl speakers called picietl entered European practice as a wound dressing that Spanish soldiers were taught by indigenous healers, was published to Europe from Seville as a cure for dozens of complaints, and is now the leading preventable cause of death in the world. The two sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printings read here name the indigenous origin plainly; a modern review supplies what they could not know and what the transfer eventually cost.