Paula de Vos is a leading historian of pharmacy in colonial Spanish America, but her interests and expertise extend further. In this important new book, de Vos offers up nothing less than a history of Galenic pharmacy, spanning a period of well over a thousand years. The geographic range of her study is suggested by its four maps: major locations in classical Greece and the Hellenistic empires, the Roman empire, the Ummayad and Abbasid empires, and finally in the viceroyalty of New Spain.
That de Vos is able to effectively cover such an enormous spatial and temporal range is a testament to the depth of her research into the fascinating world of Galenic pharmacy, a hybrid medical tradition blending Greco-Roman, Arabic, Persian, and medieval European materia medica and textual authorities. As de Vos writes, this was “the tradition that guided early modern pharmaceutical theory and practice in the West from the first centuries of the Common Era well into the nineteenth century” (4).
De Vos succeeds magnificently in the difficult task of drawing the often cryptic and puzzling recipes and references of the Galenic corpus into a larger narrative. This is a badly needed intervention in the historiography of medicine and science for two reasons. First, it is impossible to understand the transformations of medical and pharmaceutical practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without first understanding the “shared tradition of Galenic pharmacy” (17). And second, de Vos is the first historian of early modern pharmacy to fully attend to this tradition's partial origins in the Muslim world, eschewing what she rightly calls the “false dichotomy often made between ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ in the establishment of that tradition” (4–5).
Indeed, de Vos is if anything too modest in this regard. Although there are several excellent monographs on specific aspects of Galenic pharmacy, there has been no up-to-date scholarly book that documents the global practice of Galenic frameworks and recipes. This book does so. In the process, it helps us rethink the mental and material worlds of figures like the one who appears on the first page of de Vos's book, an apothecary of eighteenth-century Mexico City named Jacinto de Herrera y Campos. Such colonial apothecaries not only incorporated cures from the pre-Columbian medical corpus, but also drew on centuries of entanglement between the medieval Iberian and Muslim worlds.
In five chapters moving in rough chronological order, de Vos ably shows that the work of apothecaries practicing in both early modern Europe and the colonies of European empires cannot be reduced to a simplistic “European” or “Western” pharmaceutical tradition. Importantly, rather than relegating figures from the medieval Islamic world to the status of semi-apocryphal or half-legendary figures—as they so often are when viewed from an early modern European perspective—she makes a point of documenting the textual histories of the actual practitioners behind the Latinized names, like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Masawaih (Mesue). There is a rich vein for future work here that might further explore the links de Vos establishes between Mesoamerican and Mediterranean materia medica. Chapter 4, on “Galenic Pharmacy and the Materia Medica of the Nahuas,” will likely be of particular interest to readers of The Americas.
The text is complemented by excellent maps, numerous gray-scale illustrations, a comprehensive index, and no less than six appendices, which are of potential value as primary sources useful in teaching or graduate student research. Worthy of special mention are de Vos's very thoughtful and interesting endnotes, which offer a considerable number of leads for future work.
In short, this is an enormously erudite, creative, and wide-ranging book that will surely number among the most important publications on the history of medieval and early modern pharmacy to appear in this decade (and beyond). It will be of interest to anyone working on the history of medicine, pharmacy, drugs, bodily practice, and institutional science in the colonial Americas.
