Gregorio López, Tesoro de medicinas — a layman's remedy book vetted in print by physicians
A remedy book put together in New Spain by a hermit who was not a physician, its cures tried at the hospital of Huaxtepec and keyed to Nahuatl plant and bird names. The Madrid 1708 printing read here carries something rarer than the remedies: printed notes in which two licensed physicians qualify the hermit's prescriptions and, in places, refuse to approve them at all — inside an edition openly published to advance his canonisation.
Why this wins its question: Gregorio López is generally handled either as a hagiographical curiosity or as a bibliographic entry — "the first medical book written by a layman in New Spain" — by writers who have not opened it. Opening it changes the subject. The volume shows a devotional text passing through a licensing regime that let it be printed only with two physicians attached to it, and those physicians used the space: they qualify the hermit's remedies, insert their own bleedings before his, and in one case state flatly that they do not approve. That is a documented mechanism for how unlicensed medical knowledge was allowed into print in the Spanish world, visible on the page rather than inferred — and it sits beside Nahuatl bird and plant names used as primary terms and two remedies certified by trial at the hospital of Huaxtepec. The canonisation campaign that paid for the edition is put on the record next to all of 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 printing read here announces its own composite authorship on the title page: "TESORO DE MEDICINAS, PARA DIVERSAS ENFERMEDADES. DISPVESTO POR EL VENERABLE Gregorio Lopez", then "Añadido, corregido, y enmendado, con Notas de los Doctores, Mathias de Salazar Mariaca, y Joseph Diaz Brizuela, con tres Indices muy copiosos de diversos achaques, de yervas, y simples, y de sus virtudes, y calidades", then "TERCERA IMPRESSION" and the imprint "Con licencia en Madrid, en la Imprenta de Musica. Año de 1708". The author is given a devotional title, not a medical one; the medical authority on the page belongs to the two annotators.
The book is arranged as a list of complaints, each followed directly by remedies and no theory: the pages opened carry the headings "Bomito", "Bubas con dolores", "Bubas antiguas", "Bubas de todo genero", "Cabeça con dolor", "Tabardillo", "Temblor de miembros" and "Tercianas, y Quartanas". A reader looks up an ailment and is given substances and quantities. This is the form of a book meant to be used, not studied.
Two of the remedies are certified by a place rather than by an authority. A treatment for bubas is "buen remedio, y experimentado en este insigne Hospital de Huaztepec", and the tabardillo remedy is "vnico remedio para el tabardillo, y muy experimentado en muchissimas ocasiones en este Hospital de Huaztepec" — the hospital at Huaxtepec in New Spain, named as the place where the cures were tried. The pages read do not say who ran that hospital or over what years, and nothing is claimed here about either.
The materia medica is mixed, and the American half of it is not decorative. The entries read prescribe the root of pulque, a vulture or zopilote boiled until it falls apart, a deer's muzzle toasted and drunk in pulque, zarzaparrilla by the pound, the bark and leaves of the piciete, a camote "que llaman Parque del Carretero" taken as a purge by the weight of a real, and aristolochia root boiled with zarzaparrilla — alongside mustard, honey, turpentine, mallows, rosemary, anise and cinnamon. Old World and American remedies sit in the same prescriptions without comment.
Indigenous names are carried into the text as the working names of things. One remedy directs the reader to find "vn pajaro, que los Indios llaman Huaŭtulic, que parece à vno que se llama Carpintero, y en España llaman el Pito"; others turn on plants "que los Indios llaman xexacoyoles" and "chichicaztli". The Nahuatl term is primary and the Castilian equivalent is supplied afterwards for the reader's benefit, which is the reverse of the usual direction of glossing.
The distinctive thing about this book is that its own annotators contradict it in print, over the author's name and on the same page as his remedy. Against the tabardillo cure Salcedo notes "El baño de agua fria, es peligroso, porque es arrojar el humor adentro, la atriaca es muy caliente"; Brizuela, on the same opening, writes of another of the author's directions "No en todos los enfermos serà bueno aplicar los palomitos en la cabeça, porque suele sobrevenir delirios, y con ellos se aumentarà: no los apruebo, sino es despues de puestos oxirodinos, que son defensivos" — and only then concedes "Los demàs medicamentos son buenos". Elsewhere Brizuela allows a remedy conditionally ("El remedio es muy singular, si los bomitos no son de colera") and Salcedo prefaces the author's cure with bleedings and purges of his own before "harà los remedios del Autor".
The motive for the edition is stated in the edition itself, and it is not a medical motive. The dedication hopes that each of the author's remedies will be "vn prodigio en la operacion, y vn milagro en la eficacia, para fervorizar los animos à fomentar con sus limosnas vuestra Canonizacion", pursued "en virtud de Reales Cedulas" that commended the cause to Juan Francisco de Monte-Mayor de Cuenca, sitting oidor of the Audiencia of New Spain and formerly president and captain general in the Isla Española, who had substituted his power in the dedicator for the collection in the bishopric of Puebla de los Ángeles. A book whose cures are being offered as evidence of sanctity has an interest in those cures succeeding, and that interest is printed in its front matter.
What this object does not claim. Nothing here says that any of these remedies worked; the book is a humoral one and its treatments include repeated bleeding, and the corpus takes no position on the therapeutics. The author was a layman and the volume says so. The pages read are a small part of a 182-page printing, so the claims above describe the entries opened, not the whole book. Nothing is claimed about the Mexican printings that preceded this one, which were not read, nor about whether the annotators' notes stood in them.