This book is a detailed study of the apothecaries of Lima in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it is based on extensive knowledge of rich archives, especially hospital and apothecary inventories of materia medica (pharmaceutical ingredients and preparations). Lima, during the first two centuries of Spanish colonial rule, was a highly diverse, rapidly expanding city with large populations of enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples, many people of mixed status, and an undefined but extensive population described as Spanish. At most points in time there seem to have been relatively few apothecary shops; there were twelve in 1630, for example, but little background information is given on the size of the city and its social makeup. This is a book that seems to have been written for experts on the history of colonial Peru, but it will attract a much wider audience due to its title and remit.

Newson's original hypothesis was that colonial society may have been more medically “progressive” due to its distance from the restraints of the Old World and the health needs of the colonists, and because apothecaries “possessed the potential to be pioneers in the development of medicine” (xi) due to their access to native plants and minerals. Although Newson quickly realized that this hypothesis could not be substantiated, it remains influential throughout this otherwise interesting book. Unfortunately, the very high expectations placed on apothecaries at the start—largely drawing on modern concepts of progress, science, and experiment without much nuanced discussion—means that Newson's apothecaries are mostly presented according to a deficit model that is really rather old-fashioned. The apothecaries of Lima are usually seen as backward, slow to respond to change, hampered by the Inquisition or regulations, or too culturally conservative.

This approach is a shame because there is much in this book to suggest a more dynamic state of affairs. Newson could have expanded on the female, indigenous, or black healers who pass through these pages and were likely to have been more accessible to a wider section of the population than were the apothecaries. She could also have scrutinized more deeply some of the criticisms made of medical practitioners at the time or the identities that they were so eager to maintain. More theoretically informed history-of-science approaches on how and why knowledge moves or is constructed would have helped too, as would much greater use of recent research on apothecaries and medical trade across Asia and Europe. One only need to compare this book to Pablo Gómez's study of healing in the Caribbean during the same period (which also came out in 2017) to see that reading against the archival grain and questioning traditional hierarchies can be very fruitful indeed. The difficulty is that focusing on a small group of apothecaries has the effect of cementing stereotypes that most scholars in the field of the history of medicine have long been dismantling. There is too great a reliance on 1960s and 1970s scholarship on Spanish colonial society without recognizing that medical historiography has moved on a long way since then. Constantly seeing humoral medicine as a problem is not a helpful way of entering this particular medical world.

Newson is very thorough throughout, with absorbing chapters on the education and training of apothecaries; their business premises and transactions; the trade in medicines from Europe, within the Americas, and locally; the ingredients themselves; pharmaceutical equipment and practices; and the social world of the apothecary. For any reader who knows little about medicine in Spanish America, this book is a treasure trove, although more social and political context might have been useful for the uninitiated. This book will open up a new audience to a fascinating world of medical practice and is well worth reading. Apothecaries are certainly very important as practitioners; they and their medicines should be studied much more. Despite some methodological limitations, this book is still the first study of its kind in English and will lead the way to new insights in the future.