In sixteenth-century Lima, short lifespans made pharmacists indispensable to an urban population willing to spend “large sums of money on medical treatments” (63). In response to James Lockhart's call to “‘simply find out what went on in the Spanish colonies,’” Linda Newson draws readers into Peru's pharmaceutical world (17). Detailed descriptions illustrate the apothecary shelves stocked with drugs, funnels, mortars, pans, spatulas, and sieves, as they came together in the trastienda (back room), where pharmacists prepared poultices, salves, plasters, potions, and other medicines.
Combining social history with the history of science, technology, and medicine, Newson uncovers the logistics behind opening, running, and stocking a colonial pharmacy. In her work, she makes two interrelated claims, first that the Counter Reformation, Inquisition, and Spanish colonial bureaucracy delimited the art of pharmacy in Lima by managing the drug trade, licensing, and daily practice. And second, that although Lima's apothecaries were positioned to experiment and expand scientific knowledge owing to their exposure to New World plants, materials, and healing practices, pharmacists “adhered to traditional humoral practices” and continued importing most of their materia medica from Spain and Asia (17).
This history unfolds over eight chapters. Chapter 1 examines state regulation of colonial medical practice, indicating that Spain relied on Church bureaucracy and professionalized medical practice to offer health care and reinforce the “colonial mission” (6). Chapter 2 describes the formal education of apothecaries as they studied and trained for the profession. Chapter 3 reconstructs the pharmacy business and its daily operations, detailing the extensive financial resources required to start, run, and maintain a pharmacy. Chapter 4 analyzes the transatlantic drug trade, following merchants based in Lisbon, Antwerp, and Venice, and the cargo they dispatched to Peru. This section also addresses intercolonial trade in liquidambar, copal, tacmahac, sangre de drago, cacao, tobacco, mechoacan, guaiacum, and pepper imported primarily from Mexico and Ecuador (95). Here, Newson's analysis of ship and pharmacy records highlights the limited use of local plants among Iberian-trained medical practitioners.
In subsequent chapters (5 and 6), she attributes the popularity of imported medicines to a complex regulatory infrastructure, involving training and licensing, medical boards, the Inquisition, and censorship of non-orthodox medical texts (117–123). Moreover, based on the compilation of 2,300 prescribed medicines in Peru, Newson finds that only 9 percent of Lima's materia medica originated in the Americas, and that it consisted of mostly canafistula, sarsaparilla, liquidambar, and turpentine (166-167). Moving to the social lives of pharmacists, chapter 7 claims Spanish social hierarchies influenced the prestige and status of Lima's apothecaries. Accordingly, pharmacists were grouped with artisans because they were literate and formally trained (187, 191). The analysis concludes in chapter 8 with the persistence of humoral medicine, attributing its survival to the interwoven reluctance of the Church and state to promote new natural philosophies based on colonial experiences (219).
Newson methodically details Lima's medical milieu, and painstakingly shows pharmacists’ reluctance to incorporate local materia medica and how the state and Catholic Church curbed scientific innovation in Peru. This rich social history promises to make Spanish colonial pharmacies both comprehensible and engaging. Students of history, science, technology, and medicine will appreciate its premodern perspective and the complex layers connecting religion, society, and medical practice. This book is not only at the forefront of histories investigating medicine and society in colonial Latin America, but it is also a model in the balance of archival work, analysis, and accessible prose.
