Hipolito Unanue, Observaciones sobre el clima de Lima (1806)
The medical topography of a South American capital, by the professor of prime medicine at San Marcos, printed at Lima in 1806 and reissued at Madrid in 1815. It carries barometer readings kept in the city, four fossil molars sorted between mammoth and Cuvier's mastodon, rules for vaccinating an infant, and an argument that the artists of Mexico, Quito and Cuzco could match the best of Europe. It also carries a table of the castes of Lima headed by the word degradations.
Why this wins its question: Unanue reaches English, when he reaches it at all, as a signatory of Peruvian independence with a medical degree, and his book is named without being quoted; the standard picture of colonial Spanish America has no room for a barometric series kept in Lima or a mastodon tooth identified there against Cuvier. This object argues from the sheets: the coordinates of the city taken from the meridian of Cadiz, the barometer at twenty-seven inches four lines and the stinking red dust of 30 April 1808, four fossil molars sorted between mammoth and mastodon with the local legend of antediluvian giants declined, the numbered rules for vaccinating an infant, and the claim that the artists of Mexico, Quito and Cuzco could beat Europe's if they were taught as Europeans are. Beside all of it, and given equal weight because the book will not survive being quoted selectively: the table headed degradations of the primitive colour, the physiological account of Indian laziness credited to Erasmus Darwin, and the author's own sentence that in every one of Lima's plagues it was the indigenous nation that suffered most.
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 volume used here is the second edition, whose title page reads "OBSERVACIONES SOBRE EL CLIMA DE LIMA, Y SUS INFLUENCIAS EN LOS SERES ORGANIZADOS, en especial el hombre. POR EL DOCTOR DON HIPOLITO UNANUE, Catedratico de Prima de Medicina en la Real Universidad de San Marcos, Director del Colegio de Medicina y Cirugia de San Fernando, Medico honorario de Camara de S. M., Socio de la Real Academia Medico-matritense, Proto-medico del Peru. SEGUNDA EDICION." The imprint is "EN MADRID: EN LA IMPRENTA DE SANCHA. ANO DE 1815. Con las licencias necesarias."
The Advertencia to that edition dates the work and states its reception. The observations on the climate of Lima and its influences on organised beings, Unanue writes, were published by him in that capital in the year 1806 and have earned the esteem "no solo de los Literatos de America" but of those of Europe as well; a footnote on the same page gives two references for that claim, Humboldt's Essai politique sur la Nouvelle Espagne, volume I, page 350, and The Medical and Physical Journal, volume XXV. The book was therefore written and first printed in Lima, and this Madrid setting is a reprint of it.
The same Advertencia reprints, at length and in quotation marks, the judgement of the book published in the Memorial Literario de Madrid of 20 May 1808, number 14. Its reviewer credits the work with the merit "no solo de la originalidad, sino el de haber tratado esta materia con un orden cientifico", describes the division into three sections, and summarises the third: the commonest diseases of the country with their differences, symptoms and anomalies, the physical and mental causes, preservative measures, and the medical constitution observed in that city in the year 1799, the year being divided into its four seasons with the diseases of each. The notice is one the author chose to reprint about his own book, and is carried here at that standing.
Unanue also states his own method and his own dissatisfaction with it, and signs the statement. In this second edition, he writes, he has tried to correct, illustrate and complete the work according to the plan he set for it, his principal care having been "estudiar en la naturaleza las cosas de que trato"; only after they were known did he adorn them from memory and imagination, and where a resemblance struck him he allowed the second faculty its rights, interposing poetic images and descriptions in the philosophical narration, with Plato as his master. The Advertencia is dated "Lima y Abril 2 de 1814."
Section I opens by fixing the city by coordinates rather than by description. "Lima, Ciudad la mas rica y celebre de la America Meridional, esta situada a los 12 grados 2 minutos 51 segundos de latitud austral: 70 grados 50 minutos 51 segundos de longitud al meridiano de Cadiz", the numerals being set on the page in figures and referred in a footnote to the Guia del Peru of 1793. The chapter then places the hills that shelter the city on the east and north as branches of the great cordillera of the Andes, whose body passes north to south some twenty leagues east of the capital.
The instrumental record is the part of the book that could not have been written anywhere but in Lima. The barometer, Unanue writes, keeps regularly to a height of "27 pulgadas, 4 lineas, variando solo de dos a quatro lineas sin orden estable" by his observers' readings, and the diurnal variation of the thermometer is a degree, or at most a degree and a half, the liquid rising half by midday and the other half by four in the afternoon. A footnote records one exception in detail: an extraordinary rise of two to three lines on the morning of 30 April 1808, with the south wind blowing hard from eleven until two and scattering a stinking reddish dust, followed on the coast by a scarcity of water and by coughs and catarrhs that lasted until December.
The book does comparative palaeontology from specimens the author held. He has had four of these molars, Unanue writes, of which he keeps one in the library of the Colegio de Medicina de San Fernando; comparing them by their configuration he judged that they did not belong to a single fossil elephant, but that three were of the species of the Mammoth and one of the Mastodonton of Cuvier - from which it follows that those corpulent quadrupeds, which in remote times inhabited Siberia and North America, penetrated into the southern hemisphere. He then declines the local reading of the same bones, which took them for the giants of before the flood, and asks instead whether the fragments are petrifactions of earths and calcareous waters, citing the lime-bearing spring at the foot of the ravine between Chorrillos and Miraflores.
The answer to European theories of American inferiority is made from evidence in front of him rather than from indignation. In this second way of expressing our images and ideas, Unanue writes - that is, in sculpture and painting - "hay en Mexico, Quito, y el Cuzco una multitud de artistas capaces de competir con los mas provectos de Europa", and, he adds, of surpassing them if they had the instruction Europeans receive. Then the local case: "Aqui en Lima, en el Colegio del Principe, suelen verse muchachos indios aprendiendo a leer, que con un lapiz copian las estampas de Klauver tan perfectamente, que es dificil descubrir un rasgo de diferencia." The footnotes to the passage cite Jefferson on the state of Virginia, Guthrie, Carli and Raynal.
The cost of reading this book as a defence of American capacity is printed twenty pages later, and it belongs here as its own claim. Unanue introduces a table of the mixtures of "las tres diferentes razas de hombres que engendran a los habitantes de Lima", characterised with notes drawn from observation, and abbreviates its columns Eur., Crio., Bl., Mest., Quart., Quint., Zamb., Zam. pto. and Neg. The second table, on the facing pages, is headed "SALTA-ATRAS, O DEGRADACIONES del color primitivo" and sets unions against offspring with the proportions of blood in fractions. The notes below it are of a piece with the tables - the mestizo, for instance, "habita por lo regular a las faldas de la sierra. Constitucion herculea, espiritu y disposiciones exteriores como las de los gallegos".
The same chapter explains the supposed indolence of the Indians by their physiology, which is the other place where the argument turns against the people it defends. Discussing the vivacity and energy with which ideas pass before the soul "de los indianos", and the strong attention that follows from it, Unanue writes that this sensibility "quiza esta sensibilidad cooperara a fomentar la pereza de los indios", citing the opinion of Erasmus Darwin. A book that credits Indian boys with copying European engravings indetectably also prints a physiological account of Indian laziness, and this object records both.
On epidemics the book is precise about who died. Unanue lists the epidemic years of Lima and its region - 1628, 1634, 1635, 1693, 1784, 1787 and 1795, with 1693, 1787 and 1795 causing many deaths - and observes that the epidemics of the sierra have begun in the south and spread toward the equator while those of the coast come from the equator or the north. He then states plainly: "En todas estas pestilencias la nacion indica u originaria del pais es la que mas ha padecido." The section immediately following attributes the great number who die in epidemic times principally to the abandonment and misery in which the Indians live.
The book descends to operating instructions for vaccination, which is what a medical topography was for. Unanue sets out numbered rules for the practice: not to give three punctures in each arm in the hope of securing the fluid, since all six grains tend to erupt, inflaming the arms and causing convulsions, and if the arm is much irritated to calm it with a bath of tepid water; to avoid the time of dentition and any other sickly complication whose results might be attributed to the vaccine; to resort to it before six months of age if a smallpox epidemic is present; and to repeat the insertion after some time if the first does not take. He states that trials of the fluid were made by himself in that city and that Baron von Humboldt has cited them; the footnotes cite Benjamin Waterhouse, A Prospect of exterminating the Small pox, Part II, Cambridge 1802, and Humboldt's Essai politique.
The Conclusion says what the author thought he had built, and the footnotes name the institutions and their founders. He had meant to end the work with a compendium of the materia medica of Peru, Unanue writes, but his province of Arequipa chose him as its deputy; so "dexo a los habiles jovenes que he educado en el Real Anfiteatro de Anatomia, y Colegio de Medicina, y Cirugia de San Fernando, fundados a mi solicitud y esfuerzos en esta Capital por dos esclarecidos Virreyes el cuidado de executarlo, y de perfeccionar nuestra Medicina topografica." A footnote gives the amphitheatre as founded by the viceroy Francisco Gil, its foundation approved by Charles IV; another gives San Fernando as founded by the Marques de la Concordia, named to perpetuate the name of Ferdinand VII, and records that the king approved the foundation and granted the author the honours of physician of his royal chamber as its director. The page closes on his own epitaph for such things: "El tiempo inexorable borra, con la memoria de quien los edifico, los monumentos de vanidad, y orgullo".
What this source is and is not should be stated. It is a printed book opened here page by page, and it is good evidence of what a professor of medicine at Lima had observed, read, collected and argued by 1814, of the instruments and the fossil teeth he had in hand, and of the institutions he claimed to have procured. It is not evidence that his climatic physiology was sound, that the vaccination trials went as reported, or that either institution worked as he says - none of which this object claims. The volume is also a revised second edition, so nothing quoted here is the wording of the Lima printing of 1806, and its front matter reprints notices of the book that its own author selected.