Zarzaparrilla, the American sarsaparilla in Spanish medicine

An American climbing root taken from indigenous practice in New Spain, shipped to Seville from about 1560 and made the standard treatment for the pox after guaiac failed. Two printings read here — Seville 1580 and a Dominican apothecary's book printed at Mexico in 1615 — give the punishing sweating regimen, the milder Mexican version of it, the indigenous names of its species, and a friar's complaint that the fashionable import was worth less than plants at his own door.