Mercedes Planta's monograph seeks to track the development of traditional medicine in the Philippines from the sixteenth through the mid-twentieth century. It features information on Philippine health paradigms, midwifery, massage, bone setting, and the historical significance of the babaylan (shaman or spirit medium) figure. Its primary focus, however, is Philippine medicinal plants. Planta argues that traditional medicine has undergone “a process of accretion” (p. xxii) whereby knowledge of materia medica in particular has gradually increased over time while laying the foundation for Philippine public health.

Despite changes in the application of certain therapeutic plants and the influence of biomedical research, Planta emphasizes a cultural and historical continuity in traditional Philippine medicine. To support this claim, she cites ethnographic interviews with traditional medical practitioners to verify which of the earliest documented materia medica are still in common use. The book's closing compendium—a list of medicinal plants and their uses drawn from ten sources dating from 1668 through 1997—also works to emphasize the durable character of traditional Philippine medicine, or what Planta deems “the great holding power of Filipino culture and ways of life that are likely to continue to endure” (p. 123).

Traditional Medicine in the Colonial Philippines opens with a survey of Philippine humoral pathology and healing modalities. Chapter 1 relies on twentieth-century Philippine medical anthropology to identify shared observations in early European travelogues on the Philippines. Here, Planta engages generously with Anthony Reid's Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680 for primary source material and to situate the Philippines within the varied “ethno-medical systems” (p. 1) of Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹

Chapters 2 and 5 mine the works of Spanish missionaries Francisco Ignacio Alcina (1610–74) and Francisco Manuel Blanco (1778–1845) to highlight the uneven investment in materia medica between Spanish colonial authorities and the Catholic orders. According to Planta, Spanish missionaries were more devoted to the investigation of traditional medicine than secular colonial authorities, who were guided by economic imperative. Planta looks to Alcina's 1668 natural history of the Visayas to illuminate plants cataloged for a variety of uses and cites Alcina's as the first comprehensive record of missionaries’ interest in traditional medicine (p. 79). She then turns to Blanco's Flora de Filipinas (1837), the well-studied Augustinian publication on Philippine plants, to explore not only Blanco's intellectual preoccupation with materia medica but also the work of succeeding missionaries and secular officials to reissue and revise Blanco's influential flora.

Though economic plants were of primary concern for the state (p. 40), traditional medicine thrived in the absence of state-initiated research. Planta's reading of Alcina's and Blanco's works, published nearly two hundred years apart, attempts to accentuate the continuity of traditional medicine despite the state's neglect of materia medica. Chapters 3 and 4 follow the Spanish state's scientific preoccupations through eighteenth-century botanical expeditions, the establishment of the Jardín Botánico de Manila (JBM) in 1858, and Spanish public health policy through the end of the nineteenth century. Planta emphasizes that the JBM was primarily devoted to agriculture and plant research and not to medicinal plants. Chapter 4 looks at the inconsistent public health work of the Spanish in the Philippines. It explores how the colonial government funded a corps of trained midwives (Cuerpo de Matronas Titulares) to provide maternal care widely and to deter reliance on traditional midwifery. Planta's original engagement with archival sources on the madronas titulares serves the chapter well.

The final chapter describes the US colonial public health system in the Philippines. In it, Planta examines the coexistence of traditional Philippine medical practices and the US public health system. Compared to the Spanish administration, US colonial institutions invested in applied chemical and botanical research on local materia medica that could more readily combat common diseases (p. 109). This investment would lay the groundwork for modern Philippine public health. The notion of “accretion” gains its greatest traction in this chapter.

Traditional Medicine in the Colonial Philippines could have benefited from more meticulous translation of and full citation to original sources. Rafael García Lopez's account of the JBM and the list of medicinal plants drawn from it, for example, could have been read with more care in service of the broader argument of the work. García's inventory of medicinal plants was not an inventory of those cultivated at the botanical garden but a list compiled to inspire scientific study of native plants.Footnote ² Other inventories previously produced by the first Madrid-appointed JBM director Zoilo Espejo y Culebra did not isolate medicinal plants. It should be added that in 1874, after Espejo returned to the peninsula indefinitely, pharmacist Ynocencio Madrigal y Garrido was appointed as an interim director by the Manila government. Madrigal was interested in medicinal plant research. His interests were never executed, however. His appointment was disapproved by Madrid and by head engineers of the Inspección General de Montes [Forestry Bureau], who preferred a candidate better trained in forestry and botany.Footnote ³ Nonetheless, upon US occupation of Manila, the JBM was recorded to have had trees with medicinal properties growing on its grounds.Footnote ⁴ Perhaps in the reissue of this work, such additions could be made to qualify a more nuanced understanding of Spanish secular scientific priorities.

Traditional Medicine in the Colonial Philippines is a welcome addition to the history of medicinal plants and public health in the Philippines. It is a digestible work for undergraduate classrooms. The monograph should be read as a companion to other history publications, like those by Warwick Anderson, Greg Bankoff, and Ronaldo Mactal, as well as those of popular presses such as the reissued Flora de Filipinas edited by Domingo Madulid and the humanistic inventories in the Philippine Native Trees series by Manila-based Green Convergence.Footnote ⁵ For undergraduate Southeast Asia studies courses, it can be constructively read alongside Reid's Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce and Sokhieng Au's “cultural insolubilities” thesis in Mixed Medicines.Footnote ⁶ Its concluding compendium increases the popular appeal of the book and can be considered another addition to the literature on Philippine materia medica.