This monograph had its genesis is a previous book I published with Susie Minchin entitled, From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2007). In that book we examined the medicines and medical practices that were involved in the treatment of African slaves both during their transhipment from Senegambia to Peru as well as in Lima. Arising from this previous study, I speculated that a conjunction of political, cultural and environmental conditions in Peru favoured early experimentation with native materia medica. I started with the propositions that the Counter Reformation encouraged medical practitioners of a more “progressive” persuasion to migrate from Spain to escape scrutiny by the Inquisition and that, while the development of empirical methods was generally encouraged by Spain’s encounter with the New World, this was especially so in Peru given its rich botanical and mineral resources. As such, I postulated that medical practice in Peru might have been more “progressive” than in Spain at the time. I chose to focus on apothecaries since more than other professional medical practitioners they were pivotal in supplying Lima with medicines and, unlike physicians, had to hand the raw materials with which to experiment and thus possessed the potential to be pioneers in the development of medicine. As this book reveals, many of these original ideas proved to have limited foundation, at least for the period studied. Nevertheless, the research yielded a number of interesting findings that challenge some existing understandings of the nature of early modern medical practice. At the same time it revealed some underexplored facets of Lima’s early colonial social history.
I owe scholarly debts to a number of researchers who have generously supported this project by bringing to my attention unfamiliar sources. First, I would like to thank the brilliant and generous young scholar, Samir Boumediene, who I met while we were researching in the Jesuit archive in Rome. It was Samir who drew my attention to the unpublished manuscript by Antonio de Robles Cornejo in the Archivo del Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid that proved to be a vital source for this study and one which made me think through many of the ideas in this book. Second, I would like to thank Pablo Gómez for bringing to my notice a manuscript recently acquired by the John Carter Brown Library referring to the installation of the pharmacy of Diego de Tineo in Lima in 1555. Finally, I would like to thank Susie Minchin, who worked with me on From Capture to Sale. Without the groundwork that we undertook for that project, this book would not have been either conceived or possible.
In the course of this research I have worked in many archives and libraries in Peru, Colombia, Spain, and Italy. In particular I would like to acknowledge the service provided by Yolanda Auqui at the Archivo General de la Nacion and Laura Gutiérrez Arbulú at the Archivo Arzobispal in Lima. Finally, this research would not have been possible without the generous financial support provided by the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust, and the Leverhulme Trust.