Zarzaparrilla, the American sarsaparilla in Spanish medicine
An American climbing root taken from indigenous practice in New Spain, shipped to Seville from about 1560 and made the standard treatment for the pox after guaiac failed. Two printings read here — Seville 1580 and a Dominican apothecary's book printed at Mexico in 1615 — give the punishing sweating regimen, the milder Mexican version of it, the indigenous names of its species, and a friar's complaint that the fashionable import was worth less than plants at his own door.
Why this wins its question: English accounts of sarsaparilla jump from "a Spanish import for the pox" to nineteenth-century root beer, with no document in between. This object reads two printings on the page and sets them against each other: the Seville regimen of fifteen days in bed and forty more of abstinence, the physician's own proprietary syrup and the named patient it was first made for, the Guayaquil sweating cure with the warning that a weak patient risks his life in it, the gentler Mexican syrups taken while going about one's business, the Nahuatl and Purépecha names of four related roots, and a Dominican apothecary in Mexico writing in 1615 that the fashionable import was worth less than the plant at his door. The cross-citation between the two books — and therefore their partial dependence — is stated rather than hidden.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Monardes, writing at Seville in the 1580 collected printing, opens his chapter on the çarçaparrilla by dating its arrival: it came to "nuestras partes" after the China root, and its use had reached that city some twenty years earlier. It was first brought from New Spain, he says, "porque la vsauan los Indios por gran medicina, con que curauan muchas, y muy varias enfermedades" — the transfer is described as taken from indigenous practice, not discovered by Europeans.
He describes the plant as one that throws many roots under the ground, "largas como vna vara, y mas", of a light tawny colour, and prints the preparation in force when he wrote: two ounces of the root washed, broken and cut small, put in a new pot with three azumbres of water, steeped twenty-four hours, then covered and boiled over a slow charcoal fire until two azumbres are gone and one remains, strained cold into a glazed vessel, with a second and weaker water drawn off the same root afterwards. Ten ounces of the first water in the morning, at least two hours of sweating, clean linen, and the same again at night.
The same page records that the method had changed and that Monardes thought the change a loss. Of the earlier way — the raw mucilage pressed from the root, a good glassful hot in the morning, two hours wrapped up sweating, nothing else eaten or drunk for three continuous days — he writes that he gave it so in the beginning many times, that it did great effects, and that many sick people were cured by it, "mejor que sanan agora". A practitioner comparing two regimens of his own drug and judging the older one better is a witness against the drug's later reputation as well as for it.
The regimen he sets out is severe and long. The patient keeps the order fifteen days, at least the first nine of them in bed and the rest in the chamber, guarded from cold and air, is purged with a mild medicine at fifteen days and again at thirty, and then keeps a further forty days of regimen drinking no wine but plain water made of the same sarsaparilla, "y guardandose de muger". This, he writes, "es el modo ordinario de tomar el agua dela çarçaparrilla, que oy se vsa".
The drug's main indication was the pox, and the physician who publicised it was also selling a preparation of it. Monardes states that he makes a syrup celebrated in Seville and throughout Spain which he had used for twenty-six years "para enfermedades de Bubas, y para otras enfermedades", that it was first ordered for a named patient, Pantaleón de Negro, a Genoese already treated by many physicians and by the water of guaiac, and that he had since used it on many people. His commercial and professional interest in the drug is on the page.
The book also records the American form of the cure, at Guayaquil. The green or soaked bark of the root is cut small and pounded with water until a mucilage is drawn out; the patient drinks as much as he can in the morning, is then made to sweat "tanto, que corre el sudor por la cama, en gran cantidad", is given clean linen and a fowl, and drinks nothing but that juice; in eight or nine days, Monardes says, patients leave cured of everything sarsaparilla treats — in a place he describes as some fifty houses, mostly thatched, with cane walls and little shelter.
The same passage carries its own warning, and it is a warning about the treatment rather than the disease: whoever undertakes this cure must have strength and not be notably weak, "por que si lo esta, no podra sufrir tan gran sudor, sin mucho riesgo de su persona"; and acute fevers are excluded from it. The claim that everyone who goes there returns healthy is Monardes's own and is reported here as his claim, not as an outcome.
A book printed in Mexico in 1615 shows the same drug being handled on the American side and in a milder form. Francisco Ximénez, the Dominican who put Francisco Hernández's work into Spanish for the infirmary he served, gives two sarsaparilla syrups — one boiled down from three azumbres to one and dosed with syrup of violets, one from eight ounces of broken root in four azumbres of water sweetened with four pounds of sugar, three ounces morning and night — and states that on this order the patient cures many of those illnesses "saliendo fuera de casa y andando à sus negocios", without the confinement the Seville regimen required.
That Mexican imprint cites the Seville one by name, referring the reader who wants more remedies to "el Doctor Monardez en la primera parte delas drogas y medizinas que de las yndias lleuan à España" — evidence that the two witnesses used here are not independent of each other on the therapeutics, whatever their independence on the plants.
The 1615 book treats sarsaparilla as a family rather than a single drug and records indigenous names for its members. A chapter is given to "especie de sarçaparrilla, que llaman quauhmecatl", called cozcozcapatli or cozcoztic palancapatli by the people of Yáguitlan and yzhuatzoz by those of Michoacán; another describes a species of China root native to Michoacán, "adonde le llaman phaco"; a third treats the cozolmecatl, "que quiere dezir sogas de las cunas", as belonging in some manner to the China kind.
The counterpoint is printed in the same Mexican volume. Discussing the pehuame of Michoacán, Ximénez writes that had that plant been known in Spain "no andara su partido bajo, ni se haria tanto caudal dela china, nidela sarçaparrilla, pues en facultad y valor les haze ventaja", and adds that plants born in our own gardens, though admirable for infinite diseases, are little esteemed because foreign things always please more. A contemporary inside the trade is saying that the celebrated import was overvalued.
What this object does not claim. Neither source supports a modern verdict on whether sarsaparilla treated syphilis, and none is cited here; both are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical books working within humoral theory. Monardes never crossed the Atlantic and wrote at Seville from the testimony of returning men, in a city whose merchants and physicians profited from the trade; Ximénez writes as an interested practitioner too, from the botica of Santo Domingo where he served. Neither states what the harvesting of the root cost the people who dug it.