Cosme Bueno (1711-1798), cosmógrafo mayor of Peru
An Aragonese who reached Lima at nineteen, took a medical doctorate there, won a chair by competitive examination and held the office of chief cosmographer of the kingdom for forty years. His annual almanacs carried two things: physico-mathematical dissertations, and a province-by-province description of the viceroyalty that he assembled from the reports of corregidores. His eulogist is a disciple, and prints his faults too.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of eighteenth-century science in Spanish America runs through the French geodesic mission, Jorge Juan and Ulloa, and then jumps to Unanue and the Mercurio Peruano. The man who held the office of chief cosmographer between those two moments, for forty years, is usually a name in a footnote. Read from the eulogy his successor printed, he becomes specific: a doctorate in 1750, a chair won by examination in the same year, three hospital appointments in 1753, 1760 and 1761, the office in 1758, the Madrid and Bascongada societies in 1768 and 1784, the quadrant of the Quito measurement in his own house, a dislocated femur in 1790 and blindness in 1796. The same six pages supply what a defence would omit - the vanity, the hardness to younger men, the patients who avoided him - and a priority claim about Newton that this object marks as the eulogist's rather than adopting.
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 dates come from a eulogy printed after his death. Cosme Bueno was born at Belver in the kingdom of Aragon on 9 April 1711 and reached Peru in 1730 with his first letters and Latin grammar; settled in the capital he chose to begin the study of medicine through pharmacy, and made himself master of the three kingdoms of nature before distributing them in medical practice.
His academic career is given with its dates and its mechanism. The university decorated him with the doctoral bonnet in 1750; in the same year he obtained by oposicion - competitive examination - the chair of the method of curing, and was designated physician of the prisoners of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and in 1753, 1760 and 1761 of the hospitals of Santa Ana, San Bartolome and San Pedro. The eulogy adds the setting rather than the honour: surrounded by innumerable sick of every caste who presented themselves in those theatres of pain and death, he became as great a physician as fame painted him.
In 1758 he was elected professor of mathematics and cosmografo mayor of the kingdom, an employment the eulogist says had been covered with glory by Peralta and by Godin - the second being the French academician who stayed on in Lima. The same passage credits him with reforming a manuscript course of arithmetic and algebra for the university's scholars, which the eulogist rates above anything printed on the subject in its handling of common and decimal fractions. That comparison is an admirer's and is reported as his.
The claim usually quoted from this eulogy is a claim of priority and it is held here at low confidence. The eulogist writes that the physical and medical studies of the time in Peru were reduced to pure Peripateticism, that Cosme Bueno abandoned the common route to profit from what the academicians sent to measure the degrees of the meridian under the equator had brought from Europe, and calls him the "primer proselito de Neuton en el Peru", adding his own remark in old age that those Paris academicians were apostles of the English philosopher, initiated into what they were to preach in favour of attraction in the mountains of Peru. This is a funeral eulogy asserting a first, without a survey of who else in the viceroyalty was reading Newton.
The eulogy describes the almanacs he published annually as two things at once: one part adorned with physico-medical dissertations displaying a select erudition, the other containing the descriptions of the provinces of Peru, Chile and Buenos Aires. It regrets that no second edition of that geography was made, and doubts any successor will gather the multitude of notices, letters and papers he had collected to perfect it.
He was also a collector of the instruments left behind by visiting science. Among those he acquired the eulogist notes the quadrant that served the French academicians for the measurements at Quito, and the one used by the learned Feuillee. His house is described as the Potosi where every savant arriving from Europe came to be supplied with information - with the qualification, in the eulogist's own words, that he gave nothing except in exchange, drawing out of them whatever papers he could.
Recognition outside Peru is dated: the Sociedad Medica de Madrid associated him to its body in 1768 and the Bascongada in 1784, on the strength, the eulogist says, of the praises the returning academicians gave him and of his own pen.
The end of the life is recorded without embellishment. He married in 1744 dona Maria Gonzalez de Mendoza, who at her death in 1767 left him nine children. In 1790, taking a folio volume of Galen from his shelf, he slipped and dislocated his right femur, which was never set; his sight was already failing, and in 1796 he lost sight and hearing entirely, though he recovered the second and kept his reason to the day of his death, 11 March 1798, at the age of 87.
What makes the eulogy usable is that it prints the faults with the praises. It says the dominant passion in him was glory and superiority in medical practice; that he resembled Anton de Haen in writing energetically and eruditely but with little delicacy, in a nimious veneration of the old practitioners and in hardness and frowning towards young theorising physicians; that his reputation as an infallible prognosticator harmed his own interests, because the faint-hearted avoided calling him for fear of the final sentence; and that in his old age he laughed at all the systems.
The texts themselves survive in a nineteenth-century Lima collection, not in the almanac sheets. The volume read here is the third tome of the Coleccion de documentos literarios del Peru, collected and arranged by Manuel de Odriozola and printed at the Imprenta del Estado, Lima, in 1872; its editor's note states that he opens the tome with the geographical and scientific dissertations of the author, preceded by the notice of his life, and its index confirms that arrangement.