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MAKING LIZARDS INTO DRUGS: THE DEBATES ON THE MEDICAL USES OF REPTILES IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEXICO1

2007; Routledge; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636200701431008

1469-9818

Miruna Achim,

Archaeology and Natural History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I would like to thank John Charles, Roger Gathman, Rodrigo Martinez, Luis Sánchez Graillet, the members of the Seminario de Historia Intelectual at the UAM-Cuajimalpa (particularly Mario Barbosa, Mario Casanueva, Laura Cházarro, Georg Leidenberg, Diego Méndez, Alvaro Peláez, Estela Roselló, and Michael Schussler), as well as the several anonymous readers at the Journal for Spanish Cultural Studies for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. 2. The first edition of the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739) defines "específico" as "el que es de una sola especie y sustancia, y no está mezclado su compuesto con otra alguna y así se dice de cualquier cosa como hierba, flor, fruto, &c. Que es un específico, y de este término usan mucho los Philósophos y Médicos, para expresar un medicamento o cosa simple. Lat. Specificum-i." The contemporary English term, "specifick" comes close to the Spanish definition: "That makes a thing of the species of which it is. In medicine, appropriated to the cure of some particular distemper" (Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language 1755). 3. Throughout this essay I will be employing eighteenth-century names to refer to specific illness and will not attempt to interpret the symptoms discussed by various doctors according to modern-day nosologies. 4. Long neglected by historians of colonial science, José de Felipe Flores (Chiapas, 1751–Madrid 1824) is an important figure of the Spanish American Enlightenment. In the 1780s he participated in a smallpox inoculation campaign; in his Instrucción sobre el modo de practicar la inoculación de las viruelas y método para curar esta enfermedad, acondicionado a la naturaleza y modo de vivir de los indios (1794), Flores reveals an awareness that the success of the campaign depended directly on making it harmonious with the practices and beliefs of the indigenous populations who were to be inoculated. Among Flores's accomplishments as chair of medicine at the university were his articulated anatomical models (to make up for the absence or poor conservation of cadavers available for dissection in Guatemala). In 1796 Flores was appointed doctor of the King and left Guatemala for Madrid. Before arriving there he toured the United States, Havana, Holland, Flanders and France, where he came in contact with some of the foremost scientists of his age. In Madrid, he continued to work on various projects, including optics and steam-power. To date, the only comprehensive study of Flores is by CitationAznar López. 5. In 1783, lizard meat was administered to patients in hospitals in Málaga and Granada. A year later, Flores's treatise was published in Turin, together with a collection of experiments and observations on Piemontese lizards, under the title Del meraviglioso specifico delle lucertole o ramarri. An augmented edition of this text came out in Venice in 1785. Similarly, the treatise was translated and published by François Grasset in 1784 in Lausanne as Spécifique simple, aisé & de peu de dépense, nouvellement découvert dans le royaume de Guatimala. An expanded edition appeared in 1785. For a brief overview of the Específico′s reception in Europe, see CitationMartínez Durán (294). I would like to thank Nuria Valverde for bringing to my attention some of the Spanish readings and uses of Flores's treatise. The European readings of the Específico and the experiments on lizards performed there are topics for a different study. 6. The exception might be chocolate. Throughout the seventeenth century, various writings which addressed the question of whether chocolate broke the religious fast, also addressed the natural properties of chocolate, its medicinal uses, and its effects on the human body. 7. The bibliography on the lizard debates is minimal and has not been revised since the 1950s. John Tate Lanning, whose archival work has been a valuable contribution to the history of Mexican medicine, includes an overview of the lizard debates (482–486). See also Martínez Durán (293–294). 8. The literature linking science and European imperial expansion is too extensive to cite here. For recent studies see CitationSchiebinger and Swan, and CitationSpary. 9. The literature of the past two decades includes a number of monographic studies, as well as collections of essays on diverse aspects of science in the Spanish Empire. Of particular interest are Ciencia, vida y espacio en Iberoamérica (3 vols.) coordinated by José Luis Peset (1989) and the number on "Nature and Empire" in the history of science journal Osiris (Citation2000) with contributions by Juan Pimentel, Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and Javier Ordóñez. More recently, in 2006, the prominent journal Citation Isis conceded a small space to the discussion of "colonial science," with notes by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and CitationSteven Harris. 10. For notable recent exceptions, , see CitationPaula De Vos's history of pharmacy in New Spain and CitationMauricio Nieto's studies of the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada (forthcoming) and of materia medica in Nueva Granada and Peru. 11. This model for writing the history of Spanish American science has been patently influenced by CitationBruno Latour's concept of Citation"science in action," which follows the activity of scientists as they construct networks for collecting information, converting it into stable, "immutable mobiles" and processing it at specialized "centers of calculation." The application of this model to imperial Spanish science has tended to reduce local scientists (those who do not work in the "centers of calculation") into informants, as most Creoles were represented only in relationship to Malaspina's or to Humboldt's passage through different Spanish colonies at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Throughout this essay, I will be arguing for a wider application of Latour's model, as it tracks the making, transmission, and transaction of scientific information and artifacts across the dense, multi-nodal network that made up the scenes of inquiry across the Atlantic World. 12. Unless otherwise noted, the following account of the lizard controversies is reconstructed on basis of various "expedientes" in vol. 4706 ("Experimentos con carne de lagartijas"), Ramo Ayuntamiento, CitationArchivo Historico del Distrito Federal (AHDF), México. 13. In his study of the Protomedicato in New Spain, Lanning pointed out that the legislature was not clear as to where the City Council's jurisdiction on medical matters (primarily of public health concern) began and where the Protomedicato took over. This lack of clarity often lent itself to conflicts between these two institutions. 14. Most of these doctors' diaries were handwritten and are found in the above-mentioned volume of the AHDF. One study of six cases was printed as part of García de la Vega's more comprehensive treatise on lizards, where he addresses topics in natural history, chemistry, and indigenous pharmacology. 15. For the various conflicts between Moreno and the Protomedicato, see CitationVelasco Ceballos. In the early modern era, surgery, closely dependent on practice and empirical observation, had been more progressive but much less prestigious than university-taught medicine, which relied fundamentally on a textual tradition traceable to Galen and Hippocrates. It was at the end of the eighteenth century, however, with the institutionalization of surgery and the creation of schools, that the Protomedicato started reacting more antagonistically against surgeons like Moreno. 16. Alonso de Carriola had trained in Cádiz at the Real Seminario de Cirugía, where he probably knew Moreno, before he became chief surgeon ("primer cirujano") of the Armada and eventually settled down in Guatemala. It is important to underline epistolary relations of this sort, for they suggest unsuspected channels along which scientific information traveled between eighteenth-century Spanish American cities, outside the more acknowledged circuits that linked the colonies with the metropolis. 17. I thank Nancy Vogeley for bringing this manuscript to my attention and for making it available to me. 18. The expression "coming into being of scientific objects" (Daston, 1999) implies that, rather than primary ontological entities, the objects of scientific research are delimited and defined as objects of study. They "come into being" (become salient) and they disappear under circumstances which cannot be limited to "scientific" or epistemic considerations. As such, writing the biography of any scientific object would imply taking into account the concrete histories of social, political, cultural, ideological or technological confrontations and interactions that shaped that particular object as an object of scientific study. 19. One might note here that the human body was still considered a microcosm of events taking place on a higher, macrocosmic level, hence the tight relationship between medicine and other learned disciplines, like astrology, natural history, alchemy, physiognomy, travel writing, the art of memory, and antiquarian studies. For an excellent essay on the relation between Renaissance medicine and these fields of study, see CitationSiraisi. 20. García de la Vega reinforced a myth powerful throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, that of American Indians as one of the lost tribes of Israel. The medicinal uses of lizards, pyramid building and hieroglyphic writing by both Old and New World peoples were referenced to bolster that theory. 21. In this respect, León y Gama's work is recognized as a precursor to modern Nahua studies. He learnt Nahuatl in order to understand ancient Mexican astronomy and chronology, as present in extant codices. In 1792, he tested his knowledge when two spectacular archaeological pieces were unearthed in the Mexican central plaza. At the same time, León y Gama began a detailed botanical dictionary (his thirty or so pages did not take him beyond letter "A"), now in the Biliothèque Nationale de France, where the plant names were given in Nahuatl and the descriptions in Spanish. 22. The persistence of "pseudoscience" in the scientific practices of foremost Western scientists has come to the fore lately in historical studies of Newton's alchemy or Kepler's astrology. For a discussion on the accommodation of traditional systems of knowledge and modernity in the case of Spanish science, see CitationHill and CitationPérez Magallón, among others. 23. In an influential collection of essays, CitationClark, Golinski and Schaffer make the persuasive case that the traditional, defining differences in the historiography of the European Enlightenment (the opposition between science and imagination, religion, tradition) should be dissolved in favor of more detailed studies of local, often peripheral scenes of inquiry. The essays collected in their anthology reflect divergent meanings of the Enlightenment. For similar analyses in the Spanish-speaking world, see Hill and Pérez Magallón. 24. In an article on Linnaeus's "translation" of local plants into the constant specimens of universal taxonomy, historian CitationStaffan Müller-Wille arrives at a similar conclusion: "a multitude of viewpoints, exchanges, and the formation of specific languages at the boundaries between groups form the material condition of knowledge, and not its limits" (484). The relationship between indigenous forms of knowledge and European science has been the subject of a series of recent studies. See particularly CitationSchiebinger and CitationGrove. 25. The heterogenous epistemological, experimental, and linguistic practices that made up Citationseventeenth and eighteenth century chemistry, prior to the so-called Chemical Revolution of the late 1780s, have been the subject of a number of important studies, which include CitationMaurice Crossland's classic Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry, CitationFrederic Lawrence Holmes's Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise, and CitationUrsula Klein's "The Chemical Workshop Tradition and the Experimental Practice: Discontinuities Within Continuities."