Jose Manuel Davalos: a Lima physician barred by blood law, and the quinoa memoir Paris turned down

Son of a freed Black woman and shut out of Lima's university by the purity-of-blood statutes, Davalos took his medical degree at Montpellier and in 1787 offered the Societe Royale de Medecine of Paris a memoir on the heroic virtues of quinoa. Paris refused him. Lima's own journal granted that Europe esteemed his work and accused him of dishonouring his country by printing what its physicians got wrong.