Making Medicines is the most recent contribution to Spanish American history by Linda Newson, the prolific and interdisciplinary scholar, whose work has encompassed the full breadth of the Iberian colonial world. The book builds on recent work not only in colonial Latin American history, but also in the history of medicine and the history and sociology of science. In eight chapters and three appendices, Newson explores the private libraries, medicine cabinets, work habits, career paths and account books of Lima's countless – and, until now, largely ignored – apothecaries. Along the way, Newson shows how the ambiguities of social life in Lima between roughly 1550 and 1650 patterned apothecaries’ approaches to medical inquiry and clinical practice.

As with so many other major locations in the Spanish colonial world, Lima was abuzz with medical practitioners of many kinds, and effective regulation was limited. In Lima, licensed apothecaries employed in their shops a coterie of unlicensed and unlettered persons of native, African-descended and mixed ancestry. Long-known medicines that were common, readily accessible and frequently used in Spain were, in Lima, often hard to acquire from metropolitan suppliers. By contrast, unfamiliar and indigenous plant-based therapeutics were always to hand, and so too (thanks to the viceroyalty's extensive mining operations) were a raft of mineral and chemical compounds.

In these conditions, cross-cultural medical appropriation, experimentation and therapeutic innovation should have been pervasive – especially among apothecaries, for whom expert knowledge of drugs was the stock in trade. And yet, according to Newson, that is not what happened. How might historians account for the conservative character of the apothecary's trade in early colonial Lima?

Newson's explanation is wide-ranging, thoughtful and well documented. While medical regulation was, in practice, often slight, it was also true that the requirements of licensing and the periodic (if at times sporadic) inspections of apothecary shops made stocking Old World drugs a requirement. Their transplantation, moreover, was common and widespread so that colonial suppliers supplemented drugs imported from Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp and elsewhere across the Atlantic with those increasingly grown in Lima and its environs. Patient expectations were important too. According to Newson, the patients who patronised the city's apothecaries anticipated and even had a preference for drugs that were familiar rather than novel. That tendency was strengthened by the pervasiveness of humoral theory. Not only were university-trained physicians (who were steeped in Galenic medicine) the ones to write the prescriptions that apothecaries filled, but the notion that health was underwritten by a balance of the four humours amounted to common knowledge among all orders of society. Hence, at least in Lima, familiar medicines that fitted within a familiar and authoritative medical framework were both readily available and preferred.

Over time, Lima's apothecaries were increasingly wont to present themselves and their work as aligned with the learned medicine of physicians. Newson shows that the business of starting and keeping an apothecary shop was costly, and the prestige of learned medicine drew wealthier clients. As disparaging visions of native, African-descended and mixed-race colonial populations gained currency, the mastery of canonical texts became a way for apothecaries to mark their affiliation with normative peninsular culture, assert claims to moral propriety and demonstrate their own intellectual acumen.

The contributions of Newson's book are several. While a great deal has been written about the ambitions and activities of colonial elites and, more recently, the aspirations and experiences of the enslaved or otherwise politically and economically marginalised, much less is known about the ranks of the middling and professional classes. Here the book builds directly on the foundational work of scholars like James Lockhart (Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). Whereas the history of medicine tends to emphasise questions about such things as medical theory, anatomy and the history of human dissection, Newson's book places attention squarely on the production, sale, use and cultural significance of materia medica. In this, Newson's account of colonial Peru complements recent work on Mexico by Paula de Vos (‘Methodological Challenges Involved in Compiling the Nahua Pharmacopeia’, History of Science, 55: 2 (2017), pp. 210–33) and others. As the notes well attest, and as Latin American specialists will quickly notice, Newson capitalises on the rich literature in the social history of colonial Spanish America. This feature makes the book reminiscent of work in the history of medicine within early modern Europe by such scholars as Roy Porter (Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860 (Macmillan Press Limited, 1987)) and Katharine Park (Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton University Press, 1985)), which was similarly grounded in a rich corpus of social history.

Signally, Newson's book challenges recent interpretations that call into question the capacity of peninsular cultural norms to determine Spanish colonial approaches to health, medicine and the body. Newson insists that, for licensed apothecaries and the patients who sought them out, long-standing Old World preferences and outlooks predominated. The finding bears directly on a dominant question concerning the character of Iberian science. To what extent, if at all, did Spanish colonial activities contribute to the set of cultural and intellectual transformations centred in Europe and commonly termed a ‘Scientific Revolution’? Newson concludes that, at least in Lima, they did not. Experimentation and other kinds of innovation were limited or non-existent.

Making Medicines is carefully researched and deeply archival. Even its appendices put those qualities on display. They include not only a list of books dispatched from Spain to Lima toward the end of the seventeenth century but also – of use not only to area specialists but also to scholars of the early modern drugs trade more generally – an extensive list of the materia medica that circulated in the Spanish Atlantic.

If there were a criticism to make, it is that key concepts in the history of science and medicine which bear directly on the material in question and which figure prominently in Newson's discussion remain underdeveloped. The author draws heavily on the idea of the ‘medical marketplace’ and, although well aware of the pitfalls of such a framing (see the discussion on pp. 175–8), Newson's analysis tends to suppose that patients’ choices concerning medical treatment amounted to mutually exclusive therapeutic decisions (so the licensed apothecary before and often instead of the unlettered healer). The book is also essentialist in its handling of concepts like ‘science’, ‘experience’, ‘experimentation’ and ‘empiricism’, the meanings of which are treated as self-evident rather than historicised. What, if anything, these things might have meant to apothecaries and their patients in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima is unclear.

These and other questions may linger. But that is part of the value of Newson's book. Thanks to Making Medicines, scholars can now approach such issues with far greater clarity and specificity than they could have otherwise. The book will be a key point of reference for future studies not only on the Viceroyalty of Peru but in colonial Latin America.