Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru

No matter how much Europeans and creoles emphasized their differences from indigenous, African, and mixed-race peoples, no one in Spanish colonial society could avoid getting sick. As a result, medicine was a crucial part of everyday life and the Spanish colonial project. In her new book, Linda Newson illuminates the experiences of a group of healers understudied in the historical scholarship on medicine in colonial Latin America: boticarios (apothecaries). Drawing on an impressive array of archival and printed sources from early modern Latin America and Spain, this book offers a detailed reconstruction of the intellectual, professional, social, and economic lives of apothecaries in colonial Lima and Peru prior to 1650.The book's most important findings are that licensed apothecaries in Lima continued to embrace European humoral medicine in both theory and practice. The book first demonstrates the hegemony of humoralism in the education of apothecaries and in the licensing practices of the Protomedicato, the royal office that regulated medical practitioners throughout the Spanish empire. Chapters on the kinds of materials purchased, selected, and prepared by Lima's apothecaries demonstrate the persistence and prevalence of Old World materia medica in practice. Two appendixes listing book shipments for apothecaries in late sixteenth-century Peru further support the main findings. With additional chapters on the logistics of running a colonial pharmacy and the social world of apothecaries, the book provides a comprehensive portrait of urban, educated, licensed apothecaries in early colonial Peru.When it comes to the broader significance of these findings, Newson's study makes several important claims. First, the book emphasizes that the case of Lima's apothecaries offers a counterpoint to recent scholarship highlighting the hybridization of indigenous, African, and European medical traditions in colonial Latin America. Indeed, this study's multiple sources of evidence amply demonstrate that licensed apothecaries, while they engaged in some experimental methods, showed little interest in deviating from European humoral medicine. Newson emphasizes that the case of Lima's apothecaries shows how exchanges of knowledge in colonial contexts were seldom “free and simple” but were complex processes shaped by “cultural or institutional obstacles” as well as “the unequal distribution of power” (p. 218). Second, the book argues that the persistence of humoral medicine in early colonial Lima demonstrates that the medical marketplace was “not a unified free market in which medical practitioners competed for clients” but rather was “segmented, with a professional sector” that was “distinct from the popular sector” (p. 15). Given the evidence, there is no question that licensed apothecaries in early colonial Lima constituted a professional group that specialized in humoral medicine. What is less clear is whether their clients were as devoted to humoral medicine. At the very least, this book's main findings suggest that the dynamics of the medical marketplace in colonial Peru merit further investigation.One of the most engaging, if less convincing, aspects of the book is the discussion of early colonial Peru's scientific and medical culture. As pointed out in the introduction, many factors seemed to encourage innovation among Lima's apothecaries, including the limited reach of the Spanish state and the church in the regulation of medicine, the presence of various novel natural substances with potential medical applications, the interactions with indigenous and African healing traditions, the ready availability of mercury (the era's primary chemical medicine), and the propensity for early modern apothecaries to be in the medical avant-garde. Yet innovation was stifled and humoral medicine persisted, the book argues, because it was entrenched in Spanish culture, fostered by the Spanish church's efforts to curtail medical practitioners' engagement with Paracelsianism, the other major medical paradigm from sixteenth-century Europe. This explanation raises the question: What counts as innovation? This book seems to set a high bar by expecting Lima's apothecaries to effect a paradigm shift by practicing Paracelsian medicine (to say nothing of the implication that only European medicine could be a source of innovation). Perhaps pharmacists and physicians in early colonial Peru continued using humoralism because they were able to innovate within that paradigm in the American context. Alternatively, maybe Lima's apothecaries stuck with humoral medicine because it still worked for them and their patients—a kind of conservativism not uncommon in early modern medicine.Finally, it would be useful to hear more about why these apothecaries did not engage more with indigenous healing knowledge and materia medica. Given that Spanish colonial societies developed complex social hierarchies based on race, it seems that a desire to avoid any appearance of indulging in Indian medicine might have provided just as much of a motivation as economic or pragmatic concerns. Like all good studies, this one raises as many questions as it answers. Nonetheless, Newson's book is an informative, well-sourced, and carefully argued study that shows how greater attention to apothecaries' experience enriches our understanding of the history of medicine in colonial Latin America. Moreover, this book provides a model of how to do the social history of medicine in colonial contexts and is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the sociocultural contexts of medicine and healing in colonial Latin America

Apothecaries' system · Colonialism · Genealogy · Indigenous · Political science · Scholarship · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Medicine