Diego Cisneros, Sitio, naturaleza y propriedades de la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico, 1618)
A medical topography of Mexico City printed there in 1618 by a Complutense physician incorporated in its university: the site, the waters, the winds and the seasons, read as the causes of the diseases of one city. Its seventeenth chapter argues on Galenic grounds that the Indians of Mexico are not phlegmatic but sanguine, naming the arts they practise as the evidence, and refutes by name the planetary attribution printed by Enrico Martinez twelve years earlier.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the humoral case against indigenous Americans quote the Europeans who made it and reach for Sepulveda or for the degeneracy theorists of the eighteenth century; the printed answer made in Mexico in 1618, by a physician of the city's own university, is not in that literature at all. The folios are here instead, read from the 1618 printing: a chapter headed in its own margin "Los Indios de Mexico no son flematicos", refuting the crown cosmographer Enrico Martinez by name, arguing from Galen that no one is bad by nature but by bad upbringing, and offering as evidence the arts and offices the Indians of Mexico learn "con tan gran perfeccion". And on the same footing, because the chapter does not survive being quoted selectively: the argument is made inside humoral race typing rather than against it, it assigns a single complexion to a whole people, it reads skin colour as a sign, and the title page above it holds that medicine is uncertain without astrology.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The engraved title page reads "SITIO, NATVRALEZA Y PROPRIEDADES DE LA CIVDAD DE MEXICO. Aguas y Vientos a que esta suieta, y Tiempos del Año. Necessidad de su conocimiento para el exercicio de la Medicina su Incertidumbre y difficultad sin el de la Astrologia assi para la curacion como para los prognosticos. Por el Doctor Diego Cisneros Medico Complutense y Incorporado en la Real Vniuersidad de Mexico", dedicated "Al Exmo Señor D. Diego Fernandez de Cordoua Marques de Guadalcazar Virrey Gouernador y Capp.an General de las Prouincias de Nueua España y Presidente de la Real Chancilleria de Mexico", and is signed at the foot "Samuel Estradan Antuerpiensis Sculp. Mexici" - an Antwerp engraver cutting the plate in Mexico. The year 1618 and the printer, the bachiller Ioan Blanco de Alcaçar, are taken from the volume record of the digitisation and not from the plate.
The book's method is Hippocratic in the strict sense: it treats Airs, Waters, Places as a template and asks what one city's air, water and place do to the bodies in it. At folio 111 Cisneros lays the Hippocratic description of a marshland people over Mexico and finds it fits: "Para no auer visto los Indios de Mexico nuestro Hippocrates, no pudiera hallar en nacion ninguna tanta semejança, por que tener nauios hechos de vn solo palo, no son si no las canoas que vssan los Indios, tener las casas en el agua, y ser de maderos y cañas, es pintar con gran semejança las que ellos habitan, traginar sus mercadurias por azequias de agua, tener muchos vientos Sures, no tener mucha differencia de el frio al calor mucho concuerda, con lo que ay en Mexico". The one difference he allows is that the city's air is not as humid and clouded as the Greek text requires.
The same folio explains why the site does not make the city as wet as it should be. Mexico has little difference between heat and cold and can with reason be called temperate; and although it "auia de ser humedo en excesso por el natural Sitio, de estar fundada en esta Laguna, donde vienen a parar tantas corrientes de Rios", that quality is corrected by the force and nearness of the sun. The reasoning is climatological rather than astrological, and the marginal notes on the page are geographical: the wind the Greek text calls Cenchrona is glossed as taking its name from Cenchreae, a port at the mouth of the isthmus of Corinth.
Chapter 17 carries the running marginal heading "Los Indios de Mexico no son flematicos", and it is a refutation by name of the book this corpus already holds. Cisneros writes that following the common way of philosophising and the doctrine of Hippocrates and Galen "hallaremos que es imposible que los Indios de Mexico de quien vamos hablando sean flematicos, porque si a las influencias, y Dominio de Planetas q Enrrico Martin señala ya se ha visto su poca certeza en el capitulo passado". The planetary attribution he is rejecting is that of Enrico Martinez, the crown's cosmographer, whose Reportorio de los tiempos had been printed at Mexico in 1606.
He grounds the argument on a proposition of Galen's about education rather than nature, quoted in the margin as "nullus enim sponte fit malus sed ob prauam educationem": the doctrine, in Cisneros's words, "que dize que ninguno es malo por su naturaleza, si no por su mala criança y educacion".
The evidence he offers is what the people of the city are observed to do. Folio 112 argues that phlegmatics are, on Aristotle's word, good for nothing, "floxos, pereçosos, y ignorantes", and on Galen's "torpes, tardos al mouimiento y pereçosos, oluidadiços, insensatos, la color del cuerpo blanca" - and then says that all of this "es repugnante à los Indios, que son ligeros, curiosos, el color tostado tirante à pardisco, habiles y de ingenio como se ha visto y se vee en las Artes que exercitan, para las quales es necessario ingenio y memoria". The facility with which they learn "las Artes, y officios de qualquier calidad con tan gran perfeccion" is set down as the fact that the received doctrine cannot accommodate.
The conclusion is printed in the margin as a finding - "La templança de los indios de Mexico es sanguinea" - and the text refuses Martinez's compromise term: they cannot be called "flematicos sanguineos como quiere Enrrico", taking the humidity from phlegm and the heat from blood, because those two qualities joined must reduce to one. Cisneros states it as his own opinion that they have this as their natural temper "en commun", subject to the alterations that come with age, diet and moving from place to place.
The same chapter turns to the Spaniards of the city and divides them in two, in one of the early printed definitions of a word that was still being explained to readers: "Los Españoles y Castellanos, q habitan esta Ciudad se diuiden en dos differencias. La vna de las que nacen de Padres y abuelos Españoles q han nacido en ella, y la otra de los que vienen de España moços y de todas hedades. Los primeros que son los que vulgarmente se llaman criollos". Their first quality is to be sons and grandsons of "verdaderos Españoles, cuya complexion es colerica, y de su naturaleza animosos, atreuidos agudos, y en todas las sciencias y Artes muy perfectos, de animo inquieto, amigos de su parecer, suffridores de trabajos".
What the chapter is should be stated with what it says, because the two are the same operation. Cisneros defends the capacity of the Indians of Mexico from inside the framework that had been used against them: he does not deny that a whole people has a single complexion, he assigns them a better one, and he reads skin colour - "el color tostado tirante à pardisco" - as a diagnostic sign in the same sentence in which he credits their ingenio. Nothing in the pages read here rejects humoral race typing; the argument is conducted in it, against a rival application of it, and the peoples it sorts are sorted collectively.
At folio 125 the book makes an epidemiological argument that runs against a comfortable local belief. It is commonly said, Cisneros writes, that there has never been plague in these provinces and that therefore there can be none - a conclusion he refuses, since a thing not yet done is not a thing that will not be done. Nor, he continues, does it follow "por que el cocoliste dè en los Indios, que no pueda dar en los Españoles, donde sera fuerça dar a esta enfermedad, nombre Castellano, pues es conocida de Hipocrates, y tiene casa y solar". The marginal note reads "El cocoliste no se ha dicho que enfermedad sea". The disease that had emptied the Indian towns in 1576 is here denied the status of an Indian disease.
The title page itself states the limit of the whole enterprise and this object does not soften it: medicine is held to be uncertain and difficult without astrology, "assi para la curacion como para los prognosticos". The book is astrological medicine, and its dispute with Enrico Martinez is a dispute between two astrologies about which planets rule a people, not a rejection of the question.
What this source is and is not. Six page images of a full-view digitisation were opened and read - the engraved title page, folios 111 and 112 with the three image segments the scan divides folio 112 into, and folio 125. That is strong evidence of what was composed and printed at Mexico in 1618 and of the arguments made on those folios. It is not evidence that the book was read, that its view of cocoliztli prevailed, or that any practice changed; no figure for the printing or circulation is claimed here, and the licences and preliminaries were not opened.