Pedro Arias de Benavides, Secretos de Chirurgia (Valladolid, 1567)

A surgeon back from fifteen years in the Indies printed at Valladolid a book whose title page advertises "the manner in which the Indians cure sores and wounds and other afflictions in the Indies". Inside, experience beats authority: he rates maguey above the fashionable American drug wood, credits an indigenous healer with curing a viceroy his physicians had given up on, and says he kept his best remedy to himself because the physicians of Mexico had interests in the other one.