Abstract
This paper analyses the importance of Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (Goa, 1563) in the construction and circulation of Asian botanical and medical knowledge in the sixteenth century. It begins by examining the combined importance of experience and testimony in Orta’s assessment of materia medica from India. It then considers the relevance of interaction and exchange of medical systems between the West and the East in the Portuguese physician’s understanding of medical knowledge and practices. Finally, it analyses how medical and botanical information provided by this work was reframed by Carolus Clusius and circulated in new forms in Europe.
Highlights
On April 10, 1563 a book was published in Portuguese Goa
The Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas mediçinais da India [Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India], as it was titled, was the culmination of a life-time project of its author Garcia de Orta (c. 1500-1568) who, “with force of reasons and audacity”, attempted to present all the knowledge on simples and medicinal drugs of India gathered over his life in this territory (Orta [1563] 1891, p.6)
The importance of Orta’s work was immediately recognized by the Flemish naturalist Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) who promptly epitomised it into Latin
Summary
On April 10, 1563 a book was published in Portuguese Goa. Unlike the two previous works already produced by the printing shop of João Quinquénio and João de Endem, it did not deal with religious matters but with the natural world. The Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas mediçinais da India [Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India], as it was titled, was the culmination of a life-time project of its author Garcia de Orta (c. 1500-1568) who, “with force of reasons and audacity”, attempted to present all the knowledge on simples and medicinal drugs of India gathered over his life in this territory (Orta [1563] 1891, p.6). The relatively modest circulation of the princeps edition, together with the fact that its language was only known to a few, made chance and the efforts of foreigner crucial to the circulation of Ortas ideas It was during his trip to the Iberian Peninsula between 1564 and 1565, when tutoring Jacob Fugger, that the Flemish naturalist Carolus Clusius, who would become one of the key figures in the European natural history of the sixteenth century, found a copy of the Colloquies on the 6th January 1564:24. They enabled him to regularly receive specimens and news on “exotic” materia medica which he promptly incorporated in the edition of his works In this way, Clusius acquired a crucial role as a mediator in the circulation of new medical and botanical knowledge in sixteenth-century Europe (Egmond, 2007; Egmond, 2010).. Exoticurum libri decem (1605), in which only his name appears in the frontispiece, culminates and celebrates the central position he has managed to acquire in the exchange and circulation of medical and botanical knowledge from new and distant places for most Europeans (Clusius, 1605)
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