Nicolás Monardes, Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1565-1580)
The book that carried American pharmacy into European medicine, written by a physician who never crossed the Atlantic and who interrogated in Seville the men who had. It names the Indian healers who taught the remedies, records the author's own refusal to believe in them, and ends by indicting his countrymen for buying the drugs of New Spain as merchandise without troubling to find out what they were.
Why this wins its question: In English this book is normally met through its translation — John Frampton's "Joyfull Newes out of the newe founde worlde" — and reduced to a list of drugs and a claim about tobacco's European debut, with the author cast either as the man who introduced American medicine or as a credulous promoter. The 1580 Seville sheets, quoted here from the pages, support neither caricature and carry what both leave out: an explicit statement of method that concedes the author never went to the Indies and worked by interrogating returning men in Seville; the guayacan credited to "el Indio que era delos Medicos de aquella tierra" and the disease it treated acknowledged in the same chapter to have come from the Indies; the author's own recorded refusal to use the mechoacán root because nothing had been written of it by learned men, and his account of being proved wrong by a patient; the Indian name Picielt set against the imposed name Tabaco, and sassafras traced from the Indians to the French to the Spaniards; and the passage in which a Sevillian physician tells his countrymen they deserve "muy grande reprehension" for buying the plants of New Spain as merchandise while nobody investigates what the Indians sell in their tianguis. Achievement, motive and cost from one document.
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 collected edition read here is titled "Primera y segunda y tercera partes Dela Historia Medicinal: delas cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que siruen en Medicina", with the appended "Tratado dela Piedra Bezaar, y dela yerua Escuerçonera", the "Dialogo delas grandezas del Hierro" and the "Tratado dela Nieue, y del beuer frio", "Hechos por el Doctor Monardes, Medico de Seuilla", and printed "Con Licencia y Preuilegio de su Magestad. En Seuilla En casa de Fernando Diaz. 1580". The title page states that the third part and the Dialogo del Hierro are new to this impression and had not been printed until then, which is why the work is usually dated as a sequence rather than to one year.
The author states his purpose as a first attempt rather than a summary of received knowledge: as new regions, kingdoms and provinces have been discovered, "ellos nos han traydo nueuas medicinas, y nueuos remedios con que se curan y sanan muchas enfermedades, que si carescieramos dellas, fueran incurables, y sin ningun remedio", and since these things are not commonly known he proposed to treat and write of all of them, "delo qual sere el primero, para que los demas añadan con este principio, lo que mas supieren, y por experiencia mas hallaren".
The method, and its limit, are on the same page and in the author's own words. He can write the book because Seville "es puerto y escala de todas las Indias Occidentales", where everything arrives first and is therefore known with better report; because he has practised medicine in the city for forty years; and because in that time "me he informado delos que de aquellas partes las han traydo con mucho cuydado, y las he experimentado en muchas y diuersas personas". The knowledge is second-hand by construction: the author interrogated returning men at the Atlantic terminus and tested what they carried on patients in Spain. He never states having been in the Indies, because he had not.
The first remedy in the book is credited to a named profession of indigenous practitioners. The guayacan, he writes, was discovered when the Indies were first found, in the island of Santo Domingo, and its discovery came about "Dio noticia del vn Indio a su amo, enesta manera": a Spaniard suffering the great pains of bubas, which an Indian woman had given him, was treated by his Indian servant, "el Indio que era delos Medicos de aquella tierra", with the water of guayacan, which took away his pains and healed him. Many other infected Spaniards were cured by it; the knowledge passed to those who came from there to Seville, and from Seville through all Spain and thence through the world.
The same chapter states the disease's origin without evasion. The malady was caught by the Spaniards through dealings with the Indians; some called it "sarna Española", and others "Sarampion de las Indias", the latter "con mucha verdad, pues de alli vino el mal". He records that the great physicians of that time held large and contradictory opinions about its cause — bad melancholic food, wild herbs, or conjunctions of Saturn and Mars — and named it lepra, lichenes, menthagra, mal muerto and elephancia, "sin poder atinar ciertamente que enfermedad era. Porque ignorauan que fuesse enfermedad nueua, y querian la reduzir a alguna delas ya sabidas y escriptas". The transfer of disease and the transfer of its remedy are set down as one event.
The book contains the moment a Galenic physician was overruled by an American drug, told against himself. A patient from New Spain refused his purge, saying he carried a "Ruybarbo de Nueua España" with which everyone purged in Mexico. Monardes records his own answer: "Yo le abomine el vso de semejantes medicinas nueuas, de que no teniamos cosa alguna escripto, ni sabido, y persuadile se purgasse con las medicinas que aca teniamos, de que tanta experiencia y conoscimiento auia, y estaua escripto della por sabios varones." The patient took the Spanish purge, was relieved but not cured, refused a second, took his own root and recovered. Monardes says he was not satisfied until many others did the same, and only then "comence de vsarlo".
The mechoacán root then became European. He states that its use extended so far that it is "ya comun en todo el mundo, y se purgan con el, no solo en Nueua España y prouincias del Peru, pero en nuestra España y toda Italia, Alemania y Flandes", and that he had sent large accounts of it "casi a toda Europa, assi en latin como en nuestra lengua". A plant used in Michoacán entered the pharmacopoeia of northern Europe inside one physician's correspondence.
The commercial scale is stated, and so is what it cost the knowledge. The root is brought "por mercaderia principal, en mucha cantidad, que se vende por gran summa de dineros", and a druggist told him that beyond what he had sold in the city he had sold more than ten quintales of it outside in the past year. But of the plant itself, he writes, nobody knows anything, "y es tanto el descuydo de todos, como lleuan el principal intento al interes y a sus ganancias, q no saben mas della, de que los Indios en Mechoacan les venden, las rayzes secas y limpias, como aqui las traen, y los Españoles se las compran, y como genero de mercaderia las embian a España".
He turns that into an indictment of his own countrymen, in print, in 1580: "Y cierto en esto somos dignos de muy grande reprehension, que visto que ay en nueua España tantas yeruas, y plantas, y otras cosas medicinales, que son de tanta importancia: que ni ay quien escriua dellas, ni se sepa que virtudes, y formas tengan, para cotejarlas con las nuestras". If men had the will to investigate and test "tanto genero de medicinas como los Indios venden en sus mercados o Tianges", it would be a thing of great utility. The Nahua market is named as the research programme Spain was failing to carry out.
The tobacco chapter, headed "DEL TABACO Y DE sus grandes virtudes", opens by assigning both the plant and the knowledge of it to the Indians: it is "yerua muy antigua y conocida entre los Indios: mayormente entre los de nueua España", and after those kingdoms were won the Spaniards, "enseñados por los Indios, se aprouecharon della, en las heridas q enla guerra recebian". It also records that the European name is an imposition: "El nombre proprio suyo entre los Indios, es Picielt, que el de Tabaco es postizo, de nuestros Españoles, por vna Ysla do ay mucha cantidad del".
He describes tobacco as a drug of labour, observed rather than moralised. The Indians of the West Indies use it "para quitar el cansancio, y para tomar aliuio del trabajo": in their areytos or dances they work and tire until they can move no more, and to be able to work again the next day they take the smoke through nose and mouth, and remain as if dead, and on waking are so rested that they can work as much again. In a neighbouring passage the same observation is made of the bague of the East Indies, on the authority of García de Orta, so the American drug is set in a comparative frame rather than treated as a marvel.
The sassafras chapter records a chain of transmission in which Spain comes third. The tree "a cerca delos Indios se llama Pauame, y los Franceses lo llamaron Sassafras", and the Spaniards call it the same way "enseñados por los Franceses"; the use of the wood by decoction "en esta forma lo enseñaron los Indios a los Franceses, y ellos a nosotros". He adds a practical consequence: "como los Indios no tienen peso ni medida, no han guardado en aquellas partes orden alguna en hazer el agua deste palo", so that every soldier returning from Florida gives a different recipe, "que no poca confusion pone a los que lo han de vsar".
The book does not stay inside medicine, and the drift shows what it was for. The chapter on the coloured earths of Peru moves from pigments a correspondent sent him for making ink to the red earth "porque es minero excelentissimo de que se haze Azogue, y se saca tanta cantidad del que se lleua a nueua España naos cargadas dello, es riqueza inestimable"; the Indians, he notes, used it only mixed with gums to paint themselves when going to war. The mercury that amalgamated American silver appears in a medical treatise as inestimable wealth.
The volume is also a commercial venture and its own preliminaries say so. The Cédula Real of Philip II bound into this printing recites the petition of "el Doctor Monardes medico, vezino dela ciudad de Seuilla": that licence to print and sell the third part had been given in April 1574, that the term had run out, "y el trabajo que auia tenido en la composicion & impression auia sido mucho y el prouecho que dello auiades sacado era poco", and that he therefore asked to be allowed to print it again — which is granted, with the book to be brought back to the Council with the original before sale so that the price per volume may be fixed.