Tractado brebe de medicina (Mexico, 1579 and 1592)
A doctor turned Augustinian friar wrote a home-medicine book for people the medical profession did not reach — "la gente pobre y ausente que carece de socorro de médicos", in Indian villages and country estates. The viceroy's privilege of 1592 says so in as many words. Four editions in thirty-one years, five books ending in anatomy, and a materia medica that a later bibliographer found to be almost entirely Mexican plants.
Why this wins its question: Farfán is normally a line in a list of early Mexican imprints, or is absorbed into the fame of the first medical book printed in America. This object gives what the two standing bibliographies actually record and quotes them against each other: the viceroy's privilege naming the intended readers — the poor and the distant, in Indian villages and country estates, unable to pay intermediaries — the five-book structure ending in anatomy, the thirteen Mexican plant drugs a botanical bibliographer picked out of it, the 1579 first edition described from a copy that was sold to London before its portrait could be reproduced, and, on the same page as the praise, the deflating verdict that the book is "más que todo un formulario". It also states what neither source supports: that the biography has exactly one authority behind it.
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 book stands as entry 102, under 1592, of García Icazbalceta's catalogue of Mexican sixteenth-century imprints, which transcribes the title with the line breaks of the page: "TRACTADO BREBE DE MEDICI||na y de todas las enfermedades, hecho por el||padre fray Auguſtin Farfan, Doctor en Medici||na, y religioſo indigno de la orden de ſant||Auguſtin, en la nueua Eſpaña. Ahora||nueuamente aña-dido.||DIRIGIDO A DON LVYS DE VE||laſco, cauallero del habito de Sãctiago||y Virrey de eſta Nueua Eſpaña." The imprint below reads "En Mexico. Con priuilegio en caſa de Pedro||Ocharte. De. 1592. años"; the volume is a quarto in roman type, four preliminary leaves and text to folio 353.
The viceroy's privilege of 4 May 1592, quoted by Icazbalceta, states the book's purpose in the author's own petition and gives it a genre — Icazbalceta glosses it as a Medicina Doméstica. Farfán reported that "con ánimo de aprovechar á este reino y repúblicas de él, y ayudar á la gente pobre y ausente que carece de socorro de médicos para remedio de las enfermedades que padece estando en pueblos de indios y haciendas del campo; y no teniendo posibilidad para curarse por mano de terceras personas interesadas", he had studied to bring out the book, and sought licence to print it "para que se vaya comunicando y todos puedan usar de su doctrina". The stated addressee is the patient beyond the reach of a physician, and the stated obstacle is the cost of intermediaries.
The 1592 preliminaries are entirely local, and they are the licensing machinery of the Indies in action: an aprobación by Dr. Ortiz de Hinojosa, the author's dedication to viceroy Luis de Velasco, two sonnets by the dramatist Hernán González de Eslava in praise of author and work, and a further sonnet by Farfán dedicating the book to the viceroy. The petition adds that the work was already "visto y aprobado por el ordinario, y declarado por católico", and that the author printed with the licence and obedience of his provincial. A woodcut of a friar reading a book stands on the title, which both bibliographers suggest may be the author's portrait. The text is divided into five books: three of medicine, the fourth of surgery, the fifth of anatomy.
The first edition is of 1579, from the press of Antonio Ricardo at Mexico, and Icazbalceta describes it from autopsy: in November 1867 he saw a copy belonging to the presbyter Agustín Fischer, a quarto in roman type lacking its first nine leaves, with the colophon on the front of the last (274th) leaf reading "EN MEXICO.||En caſa de Antonio Ricardo.||Año de 1579", and the author's portrait on the verso of that same leaf. He regretted not being able to reproduce the portrait in photolithography "porque el libro fué exportado y vendido en Lóndres, en £3.3=$15.75" — the earliest recorded state of the book left Mexico for the London trade before it could be copied.
Four editions are recorded — 1579, 1592, 1604 and 1610 — and both bibliographers read the repetition as the measure of the book's reception rather than as a claim about its merit: Icazbalceta writes that "esta repetición de ediciones demuestra el aprecio con que fué recibido el libro", León that it "prueba el mérito y aceptación de la obra". Icazbalceta had not seen the 1604 edition, which he takes from Beristáin, but owned the fourth, printed in Mexico in 1610 in the press of Gerónimo Balli by Cornelio Adriano César, with a St Augustine on the title instead of the reading friar. The viceroy's privilege in that edition states that the author had died, but the leaf is torn and the date reads only "veinte y ocho dias del mes de Março de mil y ſeiſcientos....".
The pharmacological content is the reason a botanical bibliographer catalogued a medical book. Nicolás León's Biblioteca botánico-mexicana of 1895 enters it as no. 261 and states that "en ella se usan casi tan sólo medicinas vegetales de México", listing among them "el Maguey y Pulque, Mechoacan, Xalapa, Toloatzin, Chian, Tepotzan, Xocopalli, Copalli, Chilli, Xocoyolli, Matlatliztic, Pipitzahuac". A university-trained physician writing for readers without physicians built his remedies out of the plants of the country, under the names the country used for them.
The counterpoint is printed by the same bibliographer who praised the book's reception. León's critical note reads in full: "La obra es de la índole de las de su tiempo y más que todo un formulario, aunque con advertencias muy cuerdas." The verdict of the man who had read it for its plants is that it is a formulary of its period, saved by sound practical warnings — not a work of medical theory, and not ahead of its time.
The biography rests on a single authority and both bibliographers say so. Icazbalceta states plainly "no tengo del autor otras noticias que las de Beristain", and quotes him: "Natural de la Nueva España, doctor y catedrático de Medicina en la Universidad de México, cuya facultad ejerció, casado, con mucho crédito. Habiendo enviudado, tomó el hábito de S. Agustín, y profesó en el convento de México." León repeats the same account, adding that Farfán died at the beginning of the seventeenth century, on 28 March. The label Icazbalceta attaches — "primer mexicano que imprimió obra de esta materia" — therefore depends entirely on Beristáin's statement that he was American-born, and is reported here as that: a claim with one source behind it, not an established fact.
The book belongs to a sequence, not to a single first. Icazbalceta's survey of the physicians of sixteenth-century Mexico places Farfán's 1579 volume between Alonso López de Hinojosos's Suma y Recopilación de Cirugía, printed at Mexico in 1578 and again in 1595, and Juan de Cárdenas's Primera Parte de los Problemas y Secretos Maravillosos de las Indias of 1591 — which, he adds, is not properly a medical treatise but a collection of natural questions. Medical printing in Mexico was a standing trade within two decades of the first medical imprint of 1570.
What these sources cannot show. Both are bibliographies: they describe copies, transcribe preliminaries and count editions. Neither reports a single case treated out of the book, a remedy tested, or a reader in a pueblo de indios or a country hacienda who used it. The claim that the book reached the people its privilege names is the privilege's claim, made by the author in his own petition, and no evidence offered here confirms it.