The raíz de Mechoacán, the "ruybarbo de las Indias"

A purgative root from the province of Michoacán that a Purépecha healer gave to a sick Franciscan around 1550, and that within thirty years was being sold in Seville by the quintal under the borrowed name rhubarb of the Indies. The Sevillian physician who publicised it prints both halves of the story: an indigenous prescription that displaced the violent purges of European practice, and a trade so intent on its profit that nobody in Spain could describe the plant the root came from.