The Mercurio Volante (Mexico City, 1772): a weekly of physics and medicine written for the people who were not supposed to read it
A paper begun at Mexico City on 17 October 1772 by Josef Ignacio Bartolache, doctor of the Real Universidad, appearing every Wednesday because that is the day the posts of the kingdom left the capital. Its second number says it is written for those who are not sujetos de carrera and for the vulgo, and that women are a sex unjustly despised as useless for the sciences only because men have wanted it so. The same pages call the sciences successors to the ignorance of the Indians.
Why this wins its question: Where the Mercurio volante is mentioned in English at all it is as a label - the first medical periodical of the Americas - with nothing quoted from it and usually nothing cited. This object goes to the sheets of 1772 and reads them: the masthead and its date, the promise to appear on Wednesdays because that is when the royal posts left Mexico City, the attack on the misteriosa ceremonia that made everything scientific appear in Latin, the declared address to those who are not sujetos de carrera and to the vulgo, and the sentence on women as a sex unjustly abandoned and despised as useless for the sciences only because men have wanted it so. It then sets three things beside that which admirers of the paper do not print: the same author's description, in the very next number, of women as a sex weak by its own constitution; his statement in the first number that the sciences could only succeed to the barbarism and ignorance of the Indians; and the fact that the fullest nineteenth-century Mexican life of him, which this object also reads and quotes, never mentions the paper at all.
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 first number states its own date and standing on the masthead: "N. 1. Sabado 17. de Octubre de 1772. MERCURIO VOLANTE CON NOTICIAS IMPORTANTES I CURIOSAS SOBRE VARIOS ASUNTOS DE FISICA I MEDICINA. Por D. Josef Ignacio Bartolache, Doctor Medico, del Claustro de esta Real Universidad de Mexico", under the heading "PLAN DE ESTE PAPEL PERIODICO" and an epigraph from the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses which the author himself renders into Spanish verse below the Latin. From number 2 the masthead adds a dedication to the viceroy, "DEDICADO AL EXCELENTISIMO SENOR FREI DON ANTONIO MARIA BUCARELI I URSUA, VIRREI DE ESTA NUEVA ESPANA".
The plan explains the title and fixes the schedule to the machinery of empire rather than to a reading public. Mercury, the author writes, was the messenger of the gods, and by an allegory nothing reprehensible he has chosen to call Mercurio volante a loose sheet that will carry news everywhere like a messenger travelling light. It will come out "todos los Miercoles, dia en que parten de esta Capital todos los Correos del Reino". Anything a man of letters wished to send in was to be forwarded carriage paid.
He states an editorial policy on language that is the whole argument of the Bourbon scientific press in one sentence. The difficulty of printing cheaply, he writes, and "la misteriosa ceremonia de que todo lo de ciencias haia de salir en Latin, nos ha privado de muchas i mui bellas producciones", which were perhaps destined of necessity to the saffron and the rockets - that is, to wrapping paper. In other periodicals he has seen, he adds, the respect for Latin and Greek authors is kept superstitiously; there is no reason for it, and he will glory in having been born Spanish and in his countrymen showing their work and being celebrated.
The paper names its intended reader, and the choice is deliberate and argued. He protests once and for all that he does not set up as a professor of the instructed, from many of whom he has himself taken lessons, but looks "azia los que no saben, ni son Sugetos de carrera, pudiendo serlo, i a lo que llamamos vulgo, gente que pasa en todo el mundo por ignorante i ruda de profesion, aunque no todo por su culpa". A common countryman of the lowest plebe, having documents to hand in which he can instruct himself easily on matters that concern him, infallibly applies himself and succeeds, "siendo ciertisimo que el deseo de saber es con igualdad inspirado a todo hombre"; what is lacking is anyone who will take the trouble of writing for such people, whom without any reason at all others wish to leave buried in their ignorance and tacitly suppose incapable.
The same paragraph turns to women, and the sentence is the reason this paper belongs in a history of ideas. Nothing will he say in particular, because others have already said it, "de las mugeres, sexo iniquamente abandonado i despreciado como inutil para las Ciencias, no mas que por haverlo querido asi los hombres, i no por otra razon". They and the simple ignorant, he continues, may console themselves with having a soul in the body endowed with the same faculties, perhaps better ones, than those of the graduated students whom people so respect for the reputation they are held in. The exclusion of women from learning is stated as a decision taken by men and given no other cause.
He then wrote for them. Number 6, of Wednesday 25 November 1772, is headed "AVISOS ACERCA DEL MAL HYSTERICO, QUE LLAMAN latido", under an epigraph from the fourth book of the Aeneid rendered as "Triste planido, i quejas de mugeres siempre se oyen". It opens by observing that the fair sex is one half of the individuals of our species and that its particular and habitual diseases make perhaps two thirds of the plagues that afflict humanity. What follows in the same opening is the medical anthropology of the period undisguised: a sex weak by its own constitution, sickly and much exposed to contingencies by the destiny Providence gave it, fined with the deserved penalty of its prevarication. The defence of women's capacity for science and the description of women as constitutionally weak are the work of the same author in the same year.
The paper printed matter sent in by others and knew it was taking a risk in doing so. At page 114 the editor introduces a memoir from a correspondent whose identity he withholds, saying that the merit of this disguised writer overcame the temptation of fear he had at first felt in publishing a subject "expuesto a disensiones entre ciertos Facultativos", and that he is keeping the promise made in his Plan to communicate to the public the interesting notices sent to him. The memoir itself argues that the principles of the art of healing were empirical, and that anatomy and mechanics, which lend each other reciprocal support, have been and will be its fundamental basis: those who think they can explain the movements of the animal economy without knowing its structure physically are worthy of contempt, since from false principles they must always deduce false conclusions.
The paper's account of learning in New Spain is neither triumphal nor abject, and its arithmetic is checkable. A university was founded and erected here in 1553, he writes, endowed by the liberality and magnificence of Charles V, its statutes formed on a plan like that of other celebrated universities of Spain and reformed afterwards when found not adaptable to the time. The public schools established by the monarch and frequented by the youth of America have produced an infinity of men of merit, very able in what are called the major faculties, theology and jurisprudence both canonical and civil; not so great a number in medicine and philosophy, though there have been eminent ones; much less in belles lettres taken in their whole extension; and nothing or very little in the liberal arts. He says it, he adds, so that no American patriots sound the alarm against him imagining themselves aggrieved, since he does not pretend that we are held to be accomplished in every kind of science.
The counterpoint is on the same pages and is not a modern gloss on them. The fertility of the land and the benign temperament of these climates, he writes, were things already made when the conquest of this half of the globe happened, "pero no era asi de las Ciencias i Artes, que solo podian succeder a la barbarie e ignorancia de los Indios despues de un largo tiempo"; Spain had first to introduce into the conquered countries its language, its laws and its polity, reserving letters for a better occasion. A few lines later the Americas owe all their lights to our Spain and to cultivated Europe, and the labour of their conquerors was marvellously fruitful and useful. The man who wrote that women were unjustly held incapable wrote in the same number that the sciences could only succeed to the ignorance of the Indians.
Who he was is not established by the paper itself, and the fullest printed life this object could reach is a Mexican compilation of 1855 signed with the initials R. I. A. It states that Bartolache was born at Guanajuato on 30 March 1739 of parents so poor that they procured him primary instruction only with difficulty; that a gentleman whose name he never printed brought him to Mexico; that he studied peripatetic philosophy at San Ildefonso and passed to the Seminario Conciliar, where he put the neglected library in order and was rewarded with a beca; that on reading Melchor Cano he undertook to defend him against the schoolmen and was thrown out of the college without bread or shelter for it; and that Velazquez de Leon, going on commission to the Californias, named him substitute in his chair of mathematics. Because that account is a life written sixty-five years after its subject's death, warmly partisan for him, and citing a document only once, the biographical claims here are held at this confidence and no higher.
The same article records what became of him, and the shape of the career says as much about late-colonial Mexican science as the paper does. The academia de ciencias naturales set up in Mexico by superior order under the viceroy marques de Croix, in which he had been named professor of chemistry at four thousand pesos, failed; qualified as a physician, he abandoned practice and took employment as a simple official in the accounts office of the mint, rising to ensayador y apartador general after the assay office was joined to the mint; he was the first to introduce the use of iron as a remedy in Mexico, against vigorous contradiction, in powder or filings made up as tablets known in the Mexican pharmacopoeia as the pastillas de Bartolache; he observed the transit of Venus in company with Alzate, and the Paris academy ordered the observation reprinted; and he died on 9 June 1790 at fifty-one. The article lists his Lecciones matematicas printed at Mexico in 1769, an Instruccion para la cura de las viruelas, the astronomical observations of the transit, and the posthumous Opusculo Guadalupano.
That 1855 article does not mention the Mercurio volante at all, and the omission is recorded here rather than smoothed over. A four-page life which lists the mathematical lectures, the smallpox instruction, the transit observations and a devotional opuscule, and which quotes Alzate's eulogy of its subject, passes over the weekly paper in silence. Whatever the reason, it is direct evidence that by the middle of the nineteenth century the periodical was not what Bartolache was remembered for in Mexico, and it is a caution against treating later celebrations of him as continuous testimony.
The limits of this object should be stated. Eight numbers and part of a ninth were opened; how long the paper ran, how many copies were printed, who read it and whether the correspondents were real are not established by anything opened here and are not claimed. No title page, licence or colophon was found in the digitised volume, so the printer and the place of printing are not asserted either, though the author styles himself of the cloister of the Real Universidad de Mexico and the dedication is to the viceroy of New Spain. The copy digitised carries the ownership stamp of Francisco del Paso y Troncoso.