Learning From the Indians - Norton

Nicholas Monardes

• New World’s immanent triumph over the Old World was symbolized by tobacco’s ousting of the spices of Asia, the beloved laurel of antiquity, and even the olive branch of the Bible.

• Monardes’ classical, education AND hands on experience managing his transatlantic ventures enabled him to overcome the bias against new world knowladge

• Nicholas Monardes styled himself as the compiler of materia medica for the Spanish empire as Dioscorides had been for the Roman Empire.

Dioscorides

• Dioscorides was a greek doctor who served the Romans during Nero’s reign

• If Dioscorides’ example influenced the shape of the project, Galen’s humoral paradigm permeated Europeans’ understanding of the body and its environment and offered insight into the balance of health.

`Medical World

• Iberian medical consumers were quick to embrace New World remedies

• One reason that New World medicines were assimilated quickly into Spain was a tradition of medical pluralism (more than one stream of medical knowledge)

• Monardes made clear that Europeans were indebted to indigenous expertise for their knowledge about useful medicaments

• In the framework elaborated in the 1565 work Monardes compiled valuable medicinal knowledge from the New World, highlighting indigenous practices and plants.

• Monardes assimilated and followed Mesoamerican antecendent.

• Monardes sought to sanitize tobacco - reconcile European use of it with its pagan, idolatrous associations - by demonstrating tobacco used medically was properly European, and tobacco used for other purposes was not.

Francisco Hernandez

• He did for chocolate what Monardes did for tobacco

• Like Monardes, Hernandez compiled and documented indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants and their uses in the New World, highlighting the importance of native expertise.

• Their is no evidence that their publications caused an immediate surge in the numbers of tobacco and chocholate consumers

• Tobacco did not come to Europe because of medical publicity, but because medical publicity but because of consumers who had adopted the habit in the New World