Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain

Abstract

Compound Remedies invites readers into the pharmacy of Jacinto de Herrera y Campos in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. The apothecary's medicines, equipment, and records provide a glimpse into early modern medical practice. Paula De Vos asks how Galenic medicine transformed and changed before arriving in New Spain, and how it evolved in the Americas with exposure to new environments and materia medica. In answering these questions, she challenges long-held assumptions that Latin American apothecaries tell us more about colonial than European medicine. In doing so, she embraces the global turn in the history of science. De Vos contends that the history of colonial Mexican pharmacies must include key learning centers in the Mediterranean world and beyond like Córdoba, Santander, Alexandria, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Montpellier, Florence, Paris, and London (p. 15).This rich history traverses centuries of knowledge through the libraries and writings of several Mediterranean intellectuals, including Galen, Dioscorides, Paul of Aegina, Ibn Sīnā, and John Mesue. The text operates on two levels: pragmatic and intellectual. The former takes Mexico's early modern pharmacies and analyzes their inventories and technologies. De Vos contextualizes how these materials were used, understood, and applied in Western medicine. The latter level reminds readers that this art was never static—it was steeped in centuries of theoretical discourse, reflection, and revision. Nevertheless, De Vos highlights that a very small percentage of American materia medica, despite its evolving nature, was adopted and used by Iberian physicians in New Spain.One tremendous strength of the book is its geographical framing. De Vos recenters this history on the Mediterranean region and in particular Arabic scholars. This allows researchers and students to reconsider the Eurocentric roots of Western medicine and even the scientific revolution. For example, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a series of Arabic medical works were translated into Latin and disseminated in European learning centers like Salerno and Toledo. This corpus became “the basis for the medical curricula in newly established universities of Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, Padua, and, later, Salamanca” (p. 108).Another important intervention made by the book is its defiance of traditional chronological boundaries. Mexico's colonial medical practices simultaneously drew on ancient, medieval, and early modern medical theories. De Vos adeptly guides readers through these layers, bringing to the forefront actors like Mesue. Of note, Mesue's thirteenth-century Grabadin touted several key ideas that later shaped traditional Galenic practices. This included systematically organizing recipes by remedy type and determining how compound ingredients (several ingredients in one mixture) reacted when mixed.De Vos synthesizes the key concepts, texts, authors, materials, and practices of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition. She addresses additional gaps in the literature by problematizing the concept of medical virtue, examining the influence of material culture and artisanal work on the science of Galenic medicine, and exploring how chemical medicines were formulated and tied to medieval alchemy.The book benefits graduate students and researchers studying medicine in Latin America and the Mediterranean. The chapters progress naturally and balance both the theory behind pharmaceutical practices and their application in the lived world. Chapter 1 examines simples (raw natural materials) and their medical uses. Chapter 2 describes how pharmacists corrected and processed simples. It highlights how Arabic scholars attempted to explain inconsistencies in Galen's work. Moreover, in the chapter De Vos traces the search for the virtue of a total substance and the subsequent “astrologization” of natural philosophy (p. 75). Chapter 3 addresses an often-overlooked area: compounding. Compounding, key to Galenic pharmacy, involved optimizing the combination and mixture of simples. Chapter 4 focuses on Nahua materia medica from the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya peoples (p. 149). The chapter demonstrates that approximately 110 Indigenous substances formed the core of Nahua pharmacopoeia (p. 153). Finally, chapter 5 discusses alchemical pharmacy, which diverged from traditional Galenic medicine but nevertheless retained deep roots in the Mediterranean world and medieval medicine. Compound Remedies is an indispensable contribution to the history of medicine in Latin America. It is a text that readers will prefer to have at hand because it provides a wealth of reference information and much inspiration within its pages.