Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire

John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada, José Pardo-Tomás

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317098379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Early modern Spain was a global empire in which a startling variety of medical cultures came into contact, and occasionally conflict, with one another. Spanish soldiers, ambassadors, missionaries, sailors, and emigrants of all sorts carried with them to the farthest reaches of the monarchy their own ideas about sickness and health. These ideas were, in turn, influenced by local cultures. This volume tells the story of encounters among medical cultures in the early modern Spanish empire. The twelve chapters draw upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from drama, poetry, and sermons to broadsheets, travel accounts, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents; and it surveys a tremendous regional scope, from Mexico, to the Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Germany. Together, these essays propose a new interpretation of the circulation, reception, appropriation, and elaboration of ideas and practices related to sickness and health, sex, monstrosity, and death, in a historical moment marked by continuous cross-pollination among institutions and populations with a decided stake in the functioning and control of the human body. Ultimately, the volume discloses how medical cultures provided demographic, analytical, and even geographic tools that constituted a particular kind of map of knowledge and practice, upon which were plotted: the local utilities of pharmacological discoveries; cures for social unrest or decline; spaces for political and institutional struggle; and evolving understandings of monstrousness and normativity. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire puts the history of early modern Spanish medicine on a new footing in the English-speaking world.

PART 1
Spain and the New World of Medical Cultures

Chapter 1
The Culture of Peyote: Between Divination and Disease in Early Modern New Spain¹

Angélica Morales Sarabia

Introduction

Early in the seventeenth century, Agustín de Albarado believed himself to be bewitched. He was a poor herdsman from Tepecuaculco, New Spain, and as a mulatto he was socially marginalized.² With his health deteriorating, due, he believed, to the enchantment, Albarado made a decision that was not uncommon at the time: he consulted an Indian who, by means of a hallucinogenic herb known as ololiuhqui, would be able to divine the identity of the enchanter. After taking ololiuhqui, the Indian informed Albarado that the spell had been cast by someone named Nicolás, adding that only Nicolás himself could lift the spell.³ Albarado’s condition was worsening, so he went in search of Nicolás, riding more than 20 kilometers on horseback. At this point, Albarado himself began taking ololiuhqui, not as a means to learn Nicolás’s whereabouts, but rather as medicine for his “malady and sickness.”⁴ It was this decision, born of sickness and desperation, that got him into trouble. Albarado was soon tried for his use of the hallucinogen by Hernán Ruiz de Alarcón, an implacable foe of all types of quackery (Peña 48). During his interrogation, however, Albarado insisted that he took ololiuhqui only as a medicine and not as a part of witchcraft, an account corroborated by the administrator of Peloncico.⁵

This story contains a number of elements that became increasingly common in the Inquisitorial prosecution of the use of ololiuhqui, peyote, and other hallucinogenic plants. Race, social status, religion, the blurring of physical and emotional disorders, and the use of hallucinogenic herbs in both sorcery and medicine appeared constantly in the Inquisition’s attempt to stamp out what we now recognize to be a complex culture of hallucinogens. Some of what we know about the use of peyote in New Spain can be found in erudite works of natural history or medicine. But physicians and naturalists tell us only part of the story.⁶ Inquisitorial trials—particularly the trials of women accused of sorcery and witchcraft—constitute a richer and more varied source of information about the practices associated with hallucinogens in the early modern Spanish empire. Near the end of the sixteenth century and during the first half of the seventeenth, the Inquisition (also known as the Holy Office) prosecuted with particular vigor the use of natural and symbolic resources drawn from the indigenous world. The use of peyote and other hallucinogenic plants may have been related to pre-Columbian traditions, but it was alive in colonial homes where women—mothers, daughters, daughters-in-law, mulattoes, slaves, and domestic servants—lived in close-knit communities. By using herbs, women sought to pacify violent husbands or to find lost valuables and missing family members, among other quests. These daily domestic struggles and women’s responses to them reflected the complex negotiations and disputes of the society at large.

Although hallucinogenic plants, their life histories, and their medicinal uses seem to have been part of colonial women’s daily experience, sixteenth-century books by naturalists, physicians, and ecclesiastics show little interest in peyote and even less in women’s use of hallucinogens. This would change in 1620 with an edict prohibiting the use of peyote. Once the use of peyote becomes a crime prosecuted by the Inquisition, women emerge as the central players in the evolving culture of hallucinogens. By looking first at sixteenth-century books that ignored women’s participation in this culture, and then examining the Inquisitorial documents that attest to the rich interplay of varied social forces surrounding the use of hallucinogens, we can better understand how peyote functions as a nucleus around which new cultural practices are generated. In particular, the fascinating story of Petrona Babtista—who was tried by the Inquisition for her frequent peyote use—serves as a guide for understanding the confluence of race, gender, religion, and emerging medical cultures in seventeenth-century New Spain.

The problems inherent in using Inquisitorial documents to reconstruct colonial life are well known. Because these documents were generated in an atmosphere of intense social coercion, we must use them with caution, carefully consider their reliability, and ask to what extent we can treat them as trustworthy (García Cárcel 100). This does not mean, however, that they are not a valuable resource for understanding the culture of New Spain (Jaffary; Perry; Flores and Masera). The Inquisitorial trials to which women were subjected yield a very particular kind of story, one in which women try to control and act upon the reality they experience. The documents these trials produced reveal a great deal about the material conditions of the period, the operative systems of symbolic signification, and ideas about the body in sickness and health. It was often the case that the medical practices Inquisitors did not understand or found unfamiliar were branded heterodox. As Solange Alberro explains in her influential Inquisición y sociedad en México, cures of all sorts became conflated with sorcery and witchcraft.⁷ This is especially true in the case of peyote.

Antonio García de León maintains that each individual case brought before the Inquisition bears witness to the ways in which different cultures adapted themselves to one another. This adaptation led to the syncretism we find developing at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Inquisitorial documents or “processes” contain “a register of gods, incantations, healings, prayers, potions, positions and therapeutic methods” (García de León 582). Through these “registers” we can observe a society of hybridism and admixture, in which Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Indians mingle and compete for space and resources. Within this context, domestic spaces function as microcosms of the broader culture, a complete society in miniature that is markedly stratified, both socially and racially.

The domestic sphere could be a place of conflict, disagreement, and dispute, but it was also a place where new practices were generated and subsequently conserved.⁸ Whether within the home or at the level of cities and regions, New Spain was not a place of nicely delineated borders where the spaces of indigenous inhabitants could be clearly differentiated from those of the newly arrived. Instead, it was a place of juxtaposition, of “contacts and layering” (Gruzinski, Las cuatro partes 44). In other words, New Spain circa 1600 was in the midst of an unfinished—perhaps even interminable—historical process, becoming a liminal space in which Mesoamerican, Spanish, African, and Asian cultures transformed one another.

Inquisition, Culture, and Witchcraft

It has been over 50 years since Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán wrote his pioneering Medicina y magia (1963), a work that drew heavily on Inquisitorial documents and in so doing transformed scholarship on the medical cultures of New Spain. In his wide-ranging analysis, Aguirre Beltrán concluded that the practices that emerged from the contact between Mesoamerican cultures and the new settlers were distorted iterations of ancestral usages, containing “extraneous,” foreign elements that contaminated indigenous traditions (144). He was much more interested in examining how these “original” and “ancestral” traditions were maintained in the face of Inquisitorial coercion than he was in considering how new cultures, symbols, and practices might have been generated through mutual influence. Aguirre Beltrán is not wrongheaded in thinking that Indians resorted to a series of stratagems to hide their ancient beliefs and gods from Catholic priests and tribunals. But he did not consider, for example, how the renaming of the threefold entity of the Huicholes (corn, deer, peyote) in Roman Catholic terms (Jesus, Our Lady, Saint Rosa María, Saint Nicholas, Saint Anthony, etc.) might do something other than simply conserve or fail to conserve preexisting practices (148–9). The same Inquisitorial documents upon which Aguirre Beltrán relied can provide us with a sense of how the act of renaming is not just a symptom of what is lost or saved, but a conceptual map of the new spaces for the intermingling of cultures.

The catalogues of judicial archives are organized according to the misdeeds that, on the authority of the Inquisition, infringed upon faith or morality. Crimes against morality—such as bigamy, solicitation, singing, and dancing—were more common than witchcraft and sorcery (Rodríguez Delgado 115). The most commonly prosecuted acts were, by order of frequency: heresy, religious misdemeanors, solicitation, and sexual transgressions.⁹ But it is in the prosecution of witchcraft that we can learn a great deal about how hallucinogenic herbs were used as instruments in the practice of divination and sorcery.

Peyote and ololiuhqui are the hallucinogenic herbs mentioned most often in Inquisitorial documents.¹⁰ There is a reason that hallucinogens caught the attention of the Inquisition: the skilled use of specific herbs and roots—particularly those with the dramatic effects of peyote—implied dominion over nature itself. Some of the women on trial knew where the herbs grew or, at least, the parts of the plant that produced the most powerful effect. They knew how the herbs would affect the body and how to prepare them (whether they were to be used fresh or dried, etc.). It is at least conceivable that many of the women accused of witchcraft and sorcery were extra-academic medical practitioners. But there is a great deal that is not immediately apparent about women’s knowledge of herbs, including the women’s beliefs about the body and disease, their ideas about the particular ailments that afflicted them, and their awareness of any given therapeutic practice.

Although it may be possible to learn, in greater or lesser measure, what women thought about disease by analyzing Inquisitorial documents, we cannot retrospectively diagnose diseases. Such an attempt would be a pointless exercise in anachronism. Jon Arrizabalaga persuasively explains that an insurmountable barrier exists between our present and the past when it comes to finding the biological origins of illness. Disease is multidimensional; it is a biological event, it contributes to the formation of social roles, and it serves as a vehicle for sanctioning cultural norms. In this sense, disease is neither “natural” nor “transhistorical” (Arrizabalaga, “Nuevas tendencias”). Through a careful consideration of Inquisitorial documents, however, we can learn a great deal about how women attempted to treat disease or sought medical remedies to what we might now consider to be non-medical dilemmas.

Hallucinogenic Plants and Sixteenth-Century Natural History

The natural histories and medical texts composed during the sixteenth century contain numerous references to peyote and other hallucinogenic herbs, although they do not associate the use of these plants with women. The physician Francisco Hernández, for example, reported on two different varieties of peyote. One of these he described as the Zacatecan variety:

[…] which does not sprout rootlets or leaves above ground, but only a sort of fuzz adhering to it, for which reason it is hard to draw properly. They say that there is a male and female variety. It is sweet and moderately warm. When crushed and applied to the skin it is said to cure joint pain. Prodigious things are said about this root (if we are to accept the opinion widely held among the population), such as that those who eat it can foresee and predict all things: whether, for example, an enemy is to attack the next day, or if better times are ahead; the identity of the thief who stole a utensil or any other object; and many other similar things that the Chichimecas try to investigate by means of this drug. Also, when they wish to discover where this root is hidden under the ground, they discover it by eating another. It grows in humid and limy ground.¹¹

Hernández says that he could not draw the plant because it had no branches or leaves above ground. This, when combined with his description of the plant as “sweet,” probably means that he had dried samples mixed with honey.¹² Hernández also collected information on a type of peyote that he called the Xochimilcan variety. He described it as:

[…] excellent medicine, with a thick root, cylindrical and covered with down; other roots look like nuts in shape and size that branch off the principal root here and there; the single stalk is green, cylindrical and soft, with scant leaves similar to those of the pear tree, with purple peduncles, and at the end of the stalks yellow flowers contained in a scarious calyx. Its temperament is cold; one dram of the root is taken against fevers, and also against the flux of the belly.¹³

In Hernández’s description a terminological problem appears that will continue to plague naturalists, physicians, and pharmacists until well into the nineteenth century. In Mesoamerican medical practice, it was quite common to give the same name to plants that had no botanical relationship with each other; instead they might have had a similar morphological trait or therapeutic action that caused them to be associated. It is probable that many of the Inquisitorial cases that make up o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 SPAIN AND THE NEW WORLD OF MEDICAL CULTURES
• PART 2 ITINERARIES OF SPANISH MEDICINE
• PART 3 TEXTUAL CULTURES IN CONFLICT, COMPETITION, AND CIRCULATION
• Epilogue: The Difference That Made Spain, the Difference That Spain Made
• Bibliography
• Index