This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 19 November 2014, At: 07:00Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Spanish Cultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20

MAKING LIZARDS INTO DRUGS: THEDEBATES ON THE MEDICAL USESOF REPTILES IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEXICOMiruna AchimPublished online: 08 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: Miruna Achim (2007) MAKING LIZARDS INTO DRUGS: THE DEBATES ON THEMEDICAL USES OF REPTILES IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MEXICO , Journal of Spanish CulturalStudies, 8:2, 169-191, DOI: 10.1080/14636200701431008

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14636200701431008

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

MAKING LIZARDS INTO DRUGS: THE

DEBATES ON THE MEDICAL USES OF

REPTILES IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-

CENTURY MEXICO

A taste for lizards

In 1781, Jose Flores, a doctor at the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala City,published a fifteen-page booklet on the medical benefits of lizard meat with thepromising title, Especıfico nuevamente descubierto en el Reyno de Goatemala, para la curacionradical del horrible mal de cancro y otros mas frecuentes . The ‘‘especıfico’’ or ‘‘specifick,’’2

Flores wrote, was traditionally used as a remedy by the Indians of San ChristovalAmatitlan, a village in the western region of Guatemala. A local priest, hearing that anIndian woman covered with pustules was cured by lizard meat, relayed theinformation to Flores; in another sensational case, Jose Ferrer, a Catalan man,resident of Guatemala City, was healed of a cankerous mouth wound (‘‘una llagacancrosa’’), against which the doctors had lost hope.3

From his description, it is not obvious whether Flores was personally involved inFerrer’s treatment. He had a reputation, however, as a curious and innovative doctorwith a keen interest in indigenous medicines and healing practices, and he wrote theEspecıfico to publicize the re-discovery of this remedy and to prescribe some basic waysof using it, ‘‘segun el metodo de los Amatitanecos.’’4 After describing the most suitablespecies of lizards for the treatment of tumors, leprosy, and veneral diseases, hesuggested that it was best to imitate the way the Indians ingest the lizard, ‘‘quienes nosaben gastar en melindres’’: catch it, cut off its head and tail, skin it and swallow it rawand warm, so as not to waste any of its vitality. For those with queasy stomachs anddelicate tastes, he prescribed grinding lizard meat into bullet-sized pills, putting theminside wafers and swallowing them fresh. In some cases, lizard meat could be cookedand made into powders, to be applied as an ointment. After disposing of the practicaltopic of medical treatment, Flores hypothesized about the causes behind the lizards’therapeutic qualities. Lizard meat was a stimulant* like certain mixtures of antinomyand mercury, used against veneral ills, it produced excessive body heat, sweat, andsaliva* yet, while the administration of these compounds required scrupulousprecautions by doctors, lizard meat was innocuous. Flores concluded by proposingfurther research on lizards’ chemical make-up, gender differentiation, generation, andconservation; for this purpose, he wrote, he intended to send six lizards to the RealGabinete de Historia Natural in Madrid.

The fate of the six lizards (were they sent to Madrid? did they survive theirjourney? what experiments were they subjected to?) is unknown. Flores’s Especıfico ,on the other hand, enjoyed some celebrity. It was re-printed in Madrid (1782) andCadiz (1783). Translated into French and Italian, it was published in Paris, Lausanne,

Miruna Achim1

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 8, No. 2 July 2007, pp. 169�191ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2007 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636200701431008

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

Turin and Venice in 1784 and 1785.5 Still, it was in Mexico City where theGuatemalan ‘‘specifick’’ caused the strongest sensation. Flores’s booklet was re-printed there in March of 1782, and, convinced of the utility of its content, theMexico City Council (Cabildo) began distributing it at no cost to some of the city’sbookstores. Similar remedies* concoctions made from local plants and animals(including lizards)* often associated with indigenous traditions, were essential toMexican folk healing practices (Samoaya). Yet, with some notable exceptions, folkpractices passed unnoticed by university-trained doctors, who were slow to acceptchanges in both pharmacopoeia and methods, especially when such changes came frombelow. By contrast, Flores’s ‘‘specifick’’ became an object of instant interest for thescientifically-minded elites and the object of a passionate controversy. Between 1782and 1784, doctors, surgeons, pharmacists, naturalists, and city officials debated notonly if the ‘‘specifick’’ worked, or if, on the contrary, it caused more harm than good,but also the conditions and procedures for testing new medicaments. No drug hadever been so hotly contested in the history of Mexican therapeutics.6 The story of thiscontroversy, of the deeper shifts it reflects in medical and pharmaceutical history andSpanish imperial scientific policy, and of the effects of these shifts on late eighteenth-century Mexican scenes of scientific inquiry, to borrow Nicholas Jardine’s phrase, willbe the topic of this essay.7

The popularity of lizard observations and experiments in Mexico and in Europeduring the 1780s can be framed in terms of an important tendency in Westernmedicine and pharmacy: while traditional materia medica had consisted mostly ofherbals processed through relatively simple methods of preparation (cooking), by theearly eighteenth century the pharmacopoeia dramatically expanded to include notonly new plants but also ingredients derived from animals and minerals and preparedaccording to increasingly more complicated chemical procedures (De Vos in thisissue). This was occurring in conjunction with a shift in medical discursive practicesfrom philosophical disputation to reliance on testing and experiments (Cook).

In Mexico, the debates on lizards were a direct effect of a global policy initiatedby the Spanish Crown to study all natural aspects of its Empire in an effort to confrontmounting geographic, political, and commercial competition by other Europeannations (Nieto, Remedios ; Crawford in this issue). Empirical observation of nature hadbeen an indispensable element of imperial policy since the sixteenth century, offeringconcrete solutions to problems such as the establishment of trade routes or the cure ofunknown diseases (Barrera-Osorio, De Vos, ‘‘Science of Spices’’). But if theexperience and survey of nature were not in themselves novel imperial strategies,as competing European powers applied themselves systematically to the reconnais-sance, inventory, and administration of their territories in all of their natural andhuman particulars during the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown responded bydirecting a renewed and systematic effort to highlight and exploit neglected colonialresources.8 To carry this project out, new institutions were founded, like the RealJardın Botanico (1755) and the Gabinete de Historia Natural (1776); numerousscientific expeditions to the Americas were mounted; and new administrative formswere designed, such as the Relaciones of the 1770s, sets of questionnaires whereby theCrown engaged extensive networks of participants* scientists, traders, bureaucrats,and local informants* to gather, record, and compare wide-ranging data about itsterritories. In this way, the Crown pursued ever more efficient ways to protect,

1 7 0 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

control, administer, and exploit its domain. While the Spanish Crown’s promotion ofscientific activities throughout the eighteenth century has been the topic of seminalhistorical studies, during the past two decades the great majority of these have beenwritten from the perspective of Spain;9 the colonial perspective, and, in particular,the effects of imperial scientific policy on the Spanish colonies and the responses tothis policy in specific local settings, has been comparatively neglected.10 The tacitassumption has been that colonial science was derivative of metropolitan science, andthat local scientists were, at best, capable informants in an enterprise which originatedand was brought to completion in metropolitan ‘‘centers of calculation.’’11

Yet, while the Mexican lizard controversy of 1782�1784 must be placed in thiswider imperial context, it is important to recover the more specific local narrative ittells. The lizard controversy was the first of a series of fierce Mexican public debateson various topics, including solar spots, mining technology, the aurora borealis of1789, the 1790 demographic census of Mexico City, and the archaeological findings ofpre-Hispanic ruins in the early 1790s. These debates, which spanned the next twodecades, reveal an unprecedented level of involvement with the study of localrealities, and were meant for both local and foreign consumption. In different ways,these controversies collectively offer detailed evidence of the practices and uses ofscience in late colonial Mexico. The lizard controversy shows not only how medicaland pharmaceutical knowledge was made and tested in late eighteenth-centuryMexico, but also how the production and distribution of natural knowledge shapedthe cultural, political and scientific agendas of a distinct Mexican Enlightenmentculture. In the final section of this paper, I consider the dynamic relationship betweenthis local scene of inquiry and the transatlantic networks within which science wasmade, transmitted, consumed and exchanged.

The debate circuits

Following the course of the Mexican lizard debates requires some amount of detectivework. The participants pleaded their causes, answered, confronted, criticized andridiculed each other through handwritten letters, reports, notarized accounts, andprinted books; some texts were written on behalf of weighty institutions, othersexpressed individual opinions. Some were meant for strictly official purposes, othersaddressed the wider public of print literature, while a few circulated more orless clandestinely among select circles of friends. And some are probably still waitingto be found. While noting the potential lacunae, I will reconstruct the lizardcontroversy with the aim of highlighting its focal points and general characteristics asthese are revealed in the activities and writings of its more important protagonists.12

The first to enter the debate, the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato* theinstitution in charge of overseeing the professional practice of doctors, surgeons, andpharmacists* appointed a committee of experts (doctors, surgeons, a pharmacist) atthe end of May 1782 to examine Flores’s claims. After a week-long study, thecommittee concluded that lizard treatments not only did not cure anyone, but, on thecontrary, triggered serious side effects (which Flores had minimized in his text) insome patients. The panel’s pharmacist (‘‘boticario’’) reinforced the clinical findings

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 7 1

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

with his chemical experiments on lizard meat: when heated, it yielded a greenishsubstance indicative of the presence of corrosive salts. As a result, the Protomedicatorecommended the suspension of the lizard treatment. A decision of this sort meantthat the proscribed medicine could not be included in pharmacopoeias, nor sold bylicensed pharmacists; yet, it hardly affected unofficial commerce or furtherspeculations about lizard meat.

In fact, while the Protomedicato was still deliberating over the uses of lizards inmedicine, the Mexico City Council (Cabildo) accused it of not taking the lizardtreatment seriously enough and took matters into its own hands.13 First, to verify thatthe lizards used in Amatitlan were the same or similar to the ones in Mexico’s CentralValley, the City Council requested a box of Guatamalan lizards be sent to Mexico Cityby Guatemalan authorities; the request included detailed information as to how thelizards were to travel in order to arrive alive and healthy. More importantly, theCouncil enlisted its own committee of surgeons and doctors to carry out experimentswith lizards. Throughout the summer of 1782, doctors at several hospitals prescribedlizards in different forms (ointments, powders, and potions) against cancer, venerealdisease, and leprosy, among other maladies. They kept diaries of each case,assiduously describing symptoms and signs, noting down dosages and times ofadministration, the evolution of the disease, and side effects.14 A notary avowed tothe truth of these diaries and of the testimonies offered by various patients.

At the same time, as soon as the Protomedicato’s verdict was published, the CityCouncil decided to solicit the expert opinion of a scientist, and thus instructed Antoniode Leon y Gama (1735� 1802) to write a response to Flores’s Especıfico . Leon y Gamawas a Creole of encyclopedic learning, a prolific and highly-esteemed scientist* heproduced internationally-recognized astronomical studies, and wrote on miningtechnology and pre-Hispanic hieroglyphs and calendar systems (Moreno de losArcos)* but he had no training in medicine. Yet, in his Instruccion sobre el Remedio de lasLagartijas , published in July of 1782, Leon y Gama expressed enthusiasm towards the‘‘specifick,’’ called for additional trials with lizards, and criticized the work done by theProtomedicato group prior to rejecting the lizard cure: it was laziness, declared Leon yGama, which made the group write up its quick verdict, in utter disregard for the mostbasic rules of experimentation, such as repetition or variation (22). On August 16, theCity Council sent out copies of the Instruccion to city and town councils around NewSpain, encouraging local doctors and naturalists to try the lizard remedies on patientsand send trustworthy and verifiable results back to Mexico City. By late August,answers were starting to come in from places like Salvatierra, Orizaba, and Queretaro.

Over the course of three months, the City Council directed and organized amassive scientific investigation (the first project of its kind realized by a localgovernment in Mexico) which involved the mobilization of multiple resources,persons and skills, an ‘‘assemblage,’’ to use a term associated with Bruno Latour, thatcut across boundaries of class, sex, and caste. The lizard experiments had beenperformed at different scenes of inquiry (indigenous villages, towns across New Spain,hospitals, laboratories, libraries), by individuals from a wide range of backgrounds.Indigenous healers, doctors, surgeons, pharmacists, and naturalists acted in theirdiverse roles to prescribe the lizard treatment, to track and collect clinical histories,and to perform morphological, physiological or chemical observations. Patients wereselected as subjects. Legal representatives recorded sworn testimony. After gathering,

1 7 2 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

comparing, and collating this miscellaneous data, the City Council concluded thatlizards had medical benefits, and appealed for an opportunity to prove this claimbefore the unconvinced Protomedicato.

An abridged version of this conclusion was sent to Viceroy Matıas de Galvez, whofound himself mediating between the Protomedicato and the City Council.Representatives of the two institutions took one last chance to deliberate overlizards jointly: they met on September 4 in the Hospital de San Andres to examineeight lepers who had been given lizard meat and were brought there expressly fromthe Hospital de San Lazaro, on the confines of the city. This meeting failed to produceconsensus, as each side claimed to be vindicated, with few experts proposing theneutral hypothesis of a lack of effect from the administration of lizard meat. Of greatinterest for the data it gives us on the state of medical theory in late eighteenth-century Mexico are the various explanations for the causes and cures of diseases,which ranged from the theory of the four humors to references to the laws ofattraction and repulsion, and, further, to notions of miasmas and contaminated airs.The participants only agreed on one thing: the hazard caused by the eight lepers’transit through the city. Some called for the purchase of a Parisian anti-mephitic oil tosprinkle around Mexico City and thus fend off the miasmas stirred up by the sick.

While the inconclusiveness of the September 4th meeting made doctors desistfrom further lizard experiments on patients (or at least from making the resultspublic), it piqued the interest of a few scientists who sought to settle the lizardquestion once and for all, and, in so doing, to determine the procedures for provingbenefit or harm in the first place. The rest of this essay will focus on the second phaseof the debate, which took the form of five texts (four of them published and onehandwritten) exchanged between Leon y Gama and two Spanish surgeons, ManuelAntonio Moreno and Alejo Ramon Sanchez.

At the time of this debate, Moreno was the chair of surgery at the Real Escuela deCirugıa. He had trained in the prestigious Real Seminario de Cirugıa in Cadiz, hadserved as chief surgeon (‘‘primer cirujano’’) in the King’s Armada, coming to MexicoCity by royal order in 1769 to begin teaching dissections at the Real Hospital de losNaturales. In Mexico City, he had helped to found a school of surgery (Rodrıguez-Sala, Velasco Ceballos). Alejo Ramon Sanchez, another Cadiz school graduate, arrivedin Mexico City at the end of the 1770s; by 1782 he was a surgeon at the Real Hospitalde los Naturales. Both Moreno and Sanchez had participated in the first and thesecond groups commissioned by the Protomedicato to study the medical uses oflizards. This does not mean, however, that they were acting unconditionally on behalf ofthat institution when they engaged in the debate with Leon y Gama. On the contrary,during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Moreno, a determined, capable,and culturally-progressive surgeon (he was conversant in contemporary Europeanliterature, scientific and otherwise), ran into numerous conflicts with the Protomedicato,which was made up mostly of university-trained doctors who feared losing theircenturies-old privileges at the hands of the newly-institutionalized surgeons.15

The debate between Leon y Gama and the two Spanish surgeons went back to theformer’s Instruccion , which contained an indictment of the Protomedicato-commis-sioned group, charging them with laziness, lack of expertise, and willfully unreceptiveattitudes to traditional indigenous healing practices. Moreno and Sanchez read this asan affront. In their Carta Apologetica de las Reflexiones sobre el Uso de las Lagartijas ,

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 7 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

published in October 1782, the two surgeons answered Leon y Gama’s criticisms in adeferential and balanced tone. They seemed bemused by this layman’s opinions onmedical matters, and benignly corrected ‘‘errors’’ they attributed to Leon y Gama?slack of medical training, or rather, to his lack of experience in ‘‘practical medicine.’’Appended to the Carta was a letter sent from Guatemala by surgeon Alonso deCarriola,16 reporting that Flores had written about cases he knew only from hearsayand claiming that one of the patients mentioned in the Especıfico was not doing so wellafter all.

It was probably Moreno and Sanchez’s condescension that made Leon y Gama*famously hot tempered* respond with fury. He attacked his (by now) ‘‘Antag-onistas’’ in his Respuesta Satisfactoria a la Carta Apologetica que Escribieron el Lic. D. ManuelAntonio Moreno y el Br. D. Alejo Ramon Sanchez, published in July of 1783, defending hisparticipation in a medical debate against the charges of his lack of medical experienceby insisting on the relevance of other sciences (like physics and chemistry, forinstance) to medicine. Moreno y Sanchez’s answer, Observaciones Crıtico-Apologeticassobre la Respuesta Satisfactoria de D. Antonio de Leon y Gama y la Instruccion sobre el remediode las Lagartijas, del mismo autor , came out a month later. Pointing to the suspiciouspromptness of this reply and alleging that the license dispensers had shown amanuscript copy of his Respuesta to Moreno and Sanchez, Leon y Gama chose not topublish his last word in the debate: he wrote a letter, the Carta que sobre lasobservaciones crıtico-apologeticas del Sr. D. Manuel Antonio Moreno y Br. Alejo Ramon Sanchezescribıa a un Amigo , which he circulated semi-privately between the end of 1783 andthe beginning of 1784, for the satisfaction of his friends and other men of science.17 Inthe Carta , Leon y Gama promised a version of his arguments in verse, a promisewhich he apparently did not fulfill.

Ostensibly, the lizard treatment controversy was about Flores’s therapeutic claimsfor lizard meat in his Especıfico . Yet, as Leon y Gama and the two surgeons exchangedtheir ponderously-titled and progressively longer and more virulent pamphlets, theybroadened the scope of the controversy to address matters as diverse as animalclassification, chemical procedures, manuals, and instruments, anatomical drawing,the structures of the inner ear and of the eye, the circulation of blood and themechanics of the heart, the corrosiveness of certain ants, the speed of sound,Newtonian laws of attraction and repulsion, the probability of phenomena like the‘‘evil eye,’’ the history of satire, the correct use of references in scientific texts,Spanish orthography, and Nahuatl etymologies, among other issues. The ‘‘coming intobeing’’ of lizards as scientific objects18 was thus a complex and heterogeneous affair,though not exactly atypical for eighteenth-century science. Even so, the modernhistorian cannot but wonder what this deluge of apparently unrelated facts revealsabout the codes going into the making and writing of science at this time and place. Inother words, what was at stake in Leon y Gama and Moreno and Sanchez’s debate?

In a sense the varied subject matter speaks of a moment in the history of medicineprior to the strict discursive and disciplinary specializations of the nineteenth century.Even as ‘‘mechanical philosophy’’ was becoming the standard methodology of science,medicine still formed a vast, heterogeneous system of knowledge, bringing togethersciences as diverse as astrology, meteorology, philosophy, and history.19 However,Moreno and Sanchez’s state-of-the-art insistence on limiting the debates to theexperience gained by experts trained in ‘‘practical medicine’’ was consistent with

1 7 4 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

the growing rejection of laymen (no matter how erudite) in medicine. Still, that thecontroversy could so easily move beyond the immediate question of lizards’ medicaluses reveals that the criteria for discovering, witnessing, proving, and writing aboutmedical facts and truths was as yet far from being self-evident or universally-accepted,and itself subject to debate. Differences over technical fact point to broaderepistemological issues, such as the nature of discovery, evidence, trust, and authoritythat register tensions within the social, political, and cultural orders (Shapin andSchaffer; Rudwick). In other words, to prove the lizards’ benefits or harms, theparticipants in the lizard controversy had to ask themselves questions like: What did itmean to discover new materia medica? How could discoveries be framed as reliable anduseful facts? Whose proof was worthy of credibility? Was there a natural hierarchybetween the different ways of knowing (modern and traditional, lay and specialized,patient and doctor) or were they equivalent to each other? How could consensus beorganized in order to make an explanation authoritative? In the case of the lizardcontroversies, the answers to these questions retroactively confront and createcultural and social identities and build political capital in ways that involve but cannotbe reduced to oppositions between Indians and scientists, locals and foreigners,Creoles and Spaniards, while cutting across these categories in complex andunsuspected ways.

Popular secrets versus sensible ‘‘physick’’

As Jose Flores acknowledged in his Especıfico, nuevamente descubierto . . . , he did not‘‘discover’’ the medical benefits of lizards; instead, it was a case of a doctor trained inthe Western medical tradition ‘‘re-discovering’’ indigenous remedies. Joseph Garcıade la Vega, whose experiments with lizards are inexplicably absent both from the CityCouncil’s records and from the ensuing debate, drew on similar therapeutic uses oflizards by American Indians and the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to write about thelizard cures in terms of the recovery of a forgotten, priceless knowledge dating frombefore the separation of American Indians from the rest of the human race.20 In turn,Antonio de Leon y Gama reminded his readers of the flourishing medical practiceamong the ancient Mexicas , citing one of Hernan Cortes’s awed descriptions of MexicoCity’s famed markets: ‘‘Hay calles de Arbolarios, donde hay todas las raıces y yervasmedicinales que en la tierra se hallan. Hay casas, como de Boticarios, donde se vendenlas medicinas hechas, ası potables, como unguentos y emplastos’’ (Instruccion 3).

In the eighteenth century, with the exception of few books and compilations oflocal remedies (Francisco Hernandez, Alonso Lopez de Hinojosos, Gregorio Lopez,Juan de Esteyneffer), relatively little indigenous medical knowledge about nativeplants and animals reached the circles of the medical elites (though traditionalremedies did form part of popular healing practices (Samoaya)). The occultation ofthis tradition was rooted in the repressive attitude adopted in the sixteenth century bya Catholic Church determined to eliminate all vestiges of competing religious beliefs.In the eighteenth century, fear and prohibition had given way to derision by the moreenlightened classes towards what seemed like uneducated popular practices. Theeffect, whether of repression or derision, was similar: the Indians had learned not to

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 7 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

disclose the secrets of their healing wisdom. It is in this sense that we can read theopening plea in Flores’s Especıfico : ‘‘si no nos desdenamos de aprender de estas gentessencillas y procuramos tratarlos con intimidad, descubrirıamos Especıficos masimportantes que las Disertaciones mas elocuentes y que los descubrimientosmas curiosos de la Anatomıa’’.

Although he recognized the need for modesty and trust in negotiating withindigenous informants, Leon y Gama attributed the loss of indigenous medicalknowledge to less easily surmountable epistemological and linguistic barriers: thecontinuous alteration of Nahuatl words since the first moments after the Conquest:

Entre las desgracias que ha padecido la medicina herbaria de los Indios no ha sidomenor la variacion que han tenido los nombres naturales de las plantas y animalesque nuestros Espanoles han alterado o mudado enteramente. De suerte que ya nose conocen, ni por el nombre que estos le dieron, ni por el que les dabanantiguamente los Indios. [. . .] ¿Quien, al presente podra conocer la yerva dePedro de Osma, llamada ası porque un soldado de este nombre curaba conella varias enfermedades por el ano de 1568, en que escribio una carta alDr. Monardes, dandole razon de sus virtudes? Le usurpo aquel con su nombre, elque tenıa entre los Indios, y muerto el, quedaron los efectos sepultados y la yervadesconocida: El descuido que ha habido en no mantener los nombres propios delas cosas de estos Reynos, es causa de que carezcamos de innumerables remedios,que logran solamente los Indios, entre quienes se conserva su naturalnomenclatura. (Instruccion 5)

Alterations and usurpations of the original Nahuatl names for plants and animals wereresponsible, in Leon y Gamas’s eyes, for the loss of the knowledge contained in theoriginal word.

This was especially striking in the case of Nahuatl words which are formedthrough a creative process of agglutination; breaking up the word into its variouscomponents can provide the listener with multi-faceted information about the thingthat name refers to. In this sense, Leon y Gama?s study of the words used to signify‘‘lizard’’ could not be more revealing. The Nahuas had a name that designated non-poisonous reptiles (Cuetzpallin or Tecouixin) and one that generally referred topoisonous ones (Acaltetepon ). All known species of lizards were signified by addingroots (that could denote size, habitat, color, effects, etc.) to the more generic root:thus, Acuetzpallin (atl , water) designates a water lizard (caiman); Cuauhcuetzpallin(cuauhtli , tree), a tree-dwelling lizard (iguana); Tlilcuetzpallin (tlilli , black), a blacklizard; Iztacuetzpallin (iztac , white), a white lizard; Tecouixin (tetl , stone), a lizard thatdwells in the rocks; Temalcuicahuia (temalli , rottenness; cahuia , to leave), a venomousreptile (actually, a kind of snake). Thus, for Leon y Gama, learning and restoring theNahuatl names to local flora and fauna was a way of recovering essential knowledgeabout a plant or animal*of situating it into a context of use. ‘‘Antes de usar laslagartijas,’’ he warns, ‘‘asegurense que sean las inocentes, lo que se conocera o por lassenales que de estas y de las venenosas se han dado, o instruyendose de los Indios, dequienes se procurara saber el nombre mexicano, con que la conocen’’ (Instruccion6�14). Here Leon y Gama is treading an old humanistic path going back to the

1 7 6 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

Cratylus, in which etymologies of words reveal the truths of concepts (Genette). Atthe same time, he is grafting this tradition upon ethnology, a science in its infancy.

Besides the direct contact with Nahua speakers, Leon y Gama had anotherimportant tool in his study of reptile species: the few post-Conquest writings thatpreserved the Nahua names of things. Among these, the Creole scientist singles outthe studies undertaken by Doctor Francisco Hernandez, the first Protomedico of NewSpain (1571�1577), whose ‘‘Historia natural de los reptiles’’ actually includedreferences to lizard use against ‘‘el mal galico’’ and specified methods ofadministration (Hernandez 380). Leon y Gama claims to have relied on this‘‘Historia’’ as a basis for his own classification of lizards in his Instruccion . AlthoughHernandez’s manuscripts were not available in Mexico, they had been partiallydisseminated through various natural histories written in the seventeenth century, likethe one by Francisco Ximenez (Mexico, 1615) and by the Jesuit writer JohannEusebius Nieremberg (Antwerp, 1635), as well as the celebrated Thesaurus publishedby the Academia dei Lincei (Rome, 1651) (Bellingeri). Leon y Gama was familiar withthese versions, and he* together with other Creole intellectuals who consideredthemselves heirs to Hernandez’s enterprise* impatiently awaited the publication ofthe original Hernandian manuscripts (Alvarez Pelaez, Bellingeri).

Studying Nahuatl and reliable natural histories was one way of recuperating theknowledge lost by the careless use of names by the Spaniards.21 The observation andrecording of indigenous medical practices and beliefs were performed in the samerecuperative spirit. In the Instruccion , Leon y Gama documented the symptoms ofayomeme , a condition triggered by the affinity between reptile and human blood,which affected mostly small children: when women dried newly-washed clothes in thesun, if a lizard crawled on them and a child then wore those clothes, he or she woulddevelop a skin discoloration in the shape of a water turtle (literally, ayomeme ) wherethe skin made contact with the fabric where the lizard had walked. The attractionbetween human and reptile blood, or rather between their effluvia (imperceptibleaerial discharges), caused the child’s blood to ‘‘overflow,’’ hence the skin mark; onlyby pressing the blunt side of a knife against the skin could the damage be repaired.The affinity between lizards and humans also produced beneficial effects: Leon yGama had heard that the Indians applied ground lizard meat to a wound in order toextract a deeply-buried splinter (Instruccion 28�29; Carta 5v).

Leon y Gama depicted these alternately toxic and therapeutic effects of lizards onthe human body as similar to the action of a magnet on a metal body, and heattributed them to the Newtonian law of attraction and repulsion, which was beingemployed at the end of eighteenth century to explain a wide range of puzzling,inexplicable, or preternatural phenomena. He included the occult ‘‘friendship’’between lizards and humans in a long and fascinating list of comparable cases ofsympathy or antipathy in the three kingdoms (plant, animal, and mineral), which heassembled from travelers’ tales, medieval bestiaries, Renaissance emblematics,contemporary treatises on chemistry and electromagnetism, and natural historiesranging from Pliny to eighteenth-century writers. Leon y Gama’s formidablecompilation made room both for mundane cases* the attraction between mercuryand gold, the friendship between the ram and the elephant, and the latter’s ‘‘evident’’animosity against the pig* and prodigious phenomena, like the evil eye, thefascinating power of the breath of the buio (an Amazonian snake, perhaps a boa) on

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 7 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

other animals, the venomous gaze of the catoblepa (a scale-covered bull , described byPliny and by Nieremberg), or the clouding of a clean mirror if a menstruating womanglanced into it, an example of repulsion which Leon y Gama claims to have read inRobert Boyle (Instruccion 49�59).22

It is important to distinguish the meaning of discovery (in this case of naturalremedies), as it emerges from writings like Flores’s and Leon y Gama’s, from thenotion of the absolute first sighting of an object or thing, plant or animal. For thesewriters, discovery implies an act of repetition and return to an original plenitude ofknowledge, which in the colonial framework entails tracking down the secrets of theIndians, either by going back in time, to a moment of linguistic purity, or byobserving traditional practices, ‘‘untarnished’’ by contact with the Europeans; on thelevel of scholarship, it means comparing and collating these findings with theobserver’s prior knowledge of nature or of the books that disclose its secrets. Thus,the singular moment of uncovering the unknown is displaced by the mediationembodied in the accumulation of skills and knowledge over the course of years oflabor and study, allowing a scholar like Leon y Gama to understand and recover thesecrets of nature. In this way, Leon y Gama parries the question of expertise, makinga case that it is Moreno and Sanchez who lack standing.

Moreno and Sanchez dismissed Leon y Gama’s efforts to restore indigenousmedical notions, particularly in the second round of the debate (in their Observaciones).They saw no point in ‘‘recovering’’ indigenous remedies by studying originallanguages; when a cure had proved effective, the memory of that cure was never lost,as was the case with quina . Nor were Moreno and Sanchez interested in observingnative medical practices; they derided taking at face value the Indians’ explanations fortheir illnesses. They expressed shock at Leon y Gama’s description of ayomeme and ofits presumed cause: ‘‘Ya se sabe la ignorancia y aun supersticion que reina entre losIndios en orden al origen de sus males. ¡Podra darse tal credulidad en un escritor quemaneja buenas obras de Fısica y de Historia natural! [. . .] El que se trague tal noticia escapaz de engullirse un Quarango’’ (Observaciones 19).

Leon y Gama’s explanations of lizard cures in terms of occult affinities faredworse: ‘‘no debıa esperarse que el Senor Leon y Gama hubiese caıdo en una tandespreciable y risible vulgaridad, apenas acogida en el mas ignorante populacho,especialmente en unos tiempos tan ilustrados con las luces de una fısica sensata ymasculina’’(Observaciones 46). The Spanish surgeons then prescribed him an antidoteagainst all unfounded belief, a dosage of Benito Feijoo: ‘‘tamanas crederas necesitan dejusticia las reglas que ministra el Autor del Teatro crıtico en el discurso de laMatematica de la fe humana ’’(49). By the end of the debate, in the Spanish surgeons’reactions, one can read their hardly concealed indignation: how could Leon y Gamaprivilege old wives’ and native folktales and show ‘‘desprecio hacia el dictamen deunos Profesores [that is, themselves] recomendados por el Augusto CARLOS IIIquando los envio a estos Reynos a ensenar su profesion’’? Their verdict on the lizardtreatment had been ‘‘[una] exposicion justa y sincera, por orden superior’’ (5, 10).

The criticisms mounted by Moreno and Sanchez against the irreverent Creole canbe framed in terms of notions of credibility, evidence, and trust, which wereundergoing critical revisions in the eighteenth century. Whom to trust and what tobelieve in were essential in defining not only the nature of knowledge, but also theidentity of the knower. Trust had been a key issue since the European discovery of the

1 7 8 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

New World, which fomented the taste for and the traffic in novel products andmarvelous tales of far-off lands. When it came to particular experiences, a number ofguidelines* such as a gentleman’s honor code in England (Shapin and Schaffer) or amissionary’s word in the Spanish-speaking word* could create consensus around theveracity of a report. By the eighteenth century, the protocols of credibility took theform of disciplining observers against the credulity and the unbridled (and potentiallydangerous) enthusiasm and impressionism of an untrained mind, characteristic of thevulgar classes, the weak female gender, or the ‘‘superstitious’’ Indian race. It wasthrough training, observation, and quantification that the more outrageous andfantastic anecdotes and rumors circulating among the people could be naturalizedaccording to the laws of science (Daston and Park 329� 363). Moreno and Sanchezestablished a scale of trustworthiness to measure reliability and authority. They pittedindigenous custom, woman’s impressionable nature, medieval and baroque science(represented by Aquinas, Gaspar Schott, and Nieremberg) and a local informant’serudition against modern philosophy (Feijoo), disciplined (male) observation andrestraint, and the enlightened science of the King’s men. Leon y Gama’s participationin the lizard controversy transgressed various conventions befitting the practice of anenlightened gentleman: those of class, race, and gender.

Leon y Gama was quick to underline his adherence to sensible and masculine‘‘physick.’’ In fact, even his ‘‘Antagonistas’’ had shown deference and admiration forthe Creole’s talent, erudition, and expertise in their first response. Really, Leon yGama was closer to his antagonists’ scientific practices than to the Nahuas whosemedical knowledge he was helping to rescue. He often took a militant stance in theperiodic press against ignorance, superstition, rumor, or unfounded belief. He hadconstructed an astronomical observatory and a chemical laboratory for his own use,which he stocked with a collection of state-of-the-art instruments. He presentedhimself as a disciplined observer and judicious manipulator of natural phenomena. HisInstruccion included his personal experiments on lizards, whereby he sought todescribe the animal’s anatomical structure, methods of generation (whether lizardswere oviparous or viviparous), and behavior; his findings led him to deliver caveatsproscribing the uses of lizards in medicine (warnings never to use female lizards,especially pregnant ones, nor any lizards during the rainy season, and to be wary ofthe food ingested by the animal before using it) and to write instructions for keepingthem alive to ensure their maximum potency as a drug (18�22). In summary, bothantagonists and friends would have considered Leon y Gama to be an ‘‘ilustrado,’’ amember of an elite clique of knowledge-makers.

Yet, this Mexican Creole epitomizes a particular kind of Enlightenment thought,one which synthesized modern science and more traditional forms of knowledge(from the European baroque to indigenous beliefs) in its quest to observe andrepresent nature.23 In the local Enlightenment culture of eighteenth-century Mexico,popular secrets were a condition for the making of sensible and masculine ‘‘physick’’.Thus, one of Leon y Gama’s contemporaries, Jose Antonio de Alzate y Ramırez(1729�1790), demonstrated the reduced utility of a European instrument like thebarometer in Mexico, unless it was used in correlation with ‘‘rustic’’ observations ofweather signs (like the flight patterns of birds). Creole intellectuals like Alzate andLeon y Gama were adept at reading both the flight patterns and levels of mercury.Their wide-ranging skills* technical, linguistic, anthropological* enabled them

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 7 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

to straddle the boundaries between apparently incommensurate systems of knowing,to traffic with popular secrets and with technological novelties, and, ultimately, tore-write observations of indigenous practices into the languages of contemporaryscience, those of chemistry and natural history, among others.24

Turning secrets into knowledge

The natural order of lizards

A catalogue of local lizards is featured prominently in the Instruccion. As variousscholars have recently pointed out, natural history museums, collections, orinventories reflect the background, skills, tastes, and interests of the collectormore than they reflect the self-evident order of nature (Findlen; Pomyan). Leon yGama, influenced by Hernandez’s natural history, based his classification of lizards ontheir indigenous division into innocuous and venomous reptiles. His list consists ofeleven species of the first type and five of the second, each under its Nahuatl name,followed by the etymological breakdown of the word and its translation into Spanish.Leon y Gama completed each entry with morphological data and facts about eachspecies’ habitat and habits. Moreno and Sanchez found Leon y Gama’s incursion intonatural history irrelevant to the medical matter at hand, esoteric and trivial. Noamount of taxonomical, chemical, or any other kind of data could change theirmedical opinion of the lizard treatment. Yet, they were not disinterested in debatingLeon y Gama in the terrain of natural history and began by dismissing all references toHernandez as useless and exquisite erudition (perhaps wounding the Creole’ssusceptibilities). Then, rejecting (or ignoring) the practical advantages of Nahuatlnomenclature in the classification of lizards, Moreno and Sanchez complained thatNahuatl names caused confusion, and that some names corresponded to at least threespecies according to European taxonomy.

Leon y Gama defended the usefulness of Nahuatl names and answered the chargethat some species in his list had more than one counterpart in European taxonomiesby correlating his own classifications with those of European naturalists like Valmontde Bomare and Jean-Jacques Manget. In turn, he accused Moreno and Sanchez ofinaccuracies: without performing anatomical observations of Mexican lizards, theywrote (mistakenly) that these had split tongues, insisted that there was only onespecies of common lizards (designated by the generic name ‘‘lezard’’), and surmisedthat the Amatitlan lizards must have been slinks. Not knowing the Nahuatl name of aspecies could result, Leon y Gama argued, in the erroneous administration of anaphrodisiac (made from slinks) as remedy for venereal disease (this was considered apotentially explosive combination). At the same time, the Creole suggested, Morenoand Sanchez’s own taxonomical confusions reflected another kind of error,unpardonable for an eighteenth-century man of science: a deficient capacity forobservation and a superficial reading of the major authorities of natural history. ‘‘Yodirıa’’, exclaimed Leon y Gama, ‘‘que [vieron] muy superficialmente el Diccionario deHistoria Natural’’ (Instruccion 26).

Leon y Gama was referring to Valmont de Bomare’s Dictionnaire raisonne d’histoirenaturelle , an alphabetically-ordered catalogue of plants, animals, and natural

1 8 0 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

phenomena, which was popular in New Spain in its 1768 edition. A glance at theDictionnaire reveals the surprising detail that many of the more exotic examples ofanimal nature and behavior quoted by Leon y Gama throughout the lizard debateswere in fact Bomare’s. These include references to the lizards of Martinique and theAntilles (for which Leon y Gama gave the French and the indigenous names), notes onthe behavior of Brazilian lizards, descriptions of fabulous animals in the Orinocoregion, anecdotes about the Arabs’ and Egyptians’ aphrodisiac uses of lizards, andreferences to Maupertuis’s dissections and experiments with reptiles. Although hesometimes quoted Bomare, Leon y Gama often cited Bomare’s authors directly,giving the impression of having read more on lizards than he actually did* an astuteand profitable use of Bomare’s book by an intellectual who did not always have accessto all the latest novelties in natural history. No wonder, then, that one of the worstcriticisms Leon y Gama felt he could direct against Moreno and Sanchez was that theywere superficial readers of Bomare when they took a lizard for a slink. This meant thatthey neglected the multiple layers of references to that animal by writers of allkinds* chroniclers, travelers, experimentalists, academicians, and philosophers. Justas an animal’s name in Nahuatl denotes all sorts of information about it, an animal’sname is European languages encloses a narrative of its natural history.

In his foray into natural history, Leon y Gama moves between different modes ofknowing lizards: his own experiments, indigenous classifications and beliefs, andEuropean natural histories. Each of these modes offers him certain advantages. Thus,references to authors like Bomare (but also Manget, the Jesuits Nieremberg andJoseph Gumilla, the members of the Royal Society in London and of the Academie desSciences in Paris) supplement his solitary findings and lend him the authority to speakon behalf of an extensive network of allies. In turn, Leon y Gama’s observations andcollection of local knowledge about lizards are precisely the kind of credentials heneeds in order to enter the cosmopolitan network of naturalists. Thus, rather thanisolating the different modes of knowledge (empirical, historical, and indigenous) onefrom the other, Leon y Gama dissolves the boundary lines between them; rather thanprivileging one form of knowing over another, his strategy consists of combining themand making them interdependent. His preservation of Nahuatl names in his naturalhistory of local lizards, for example, is indicative of an epistemic hybridity that reflectsbroader cultural convictions. During the last two decades of the eighteenth-century,Mexican naturalists like Alzate took up the task of defending local plant names againsttheir replacement with those of the Linnean classification, which, they argued, madethe youth obsess over sexual imagery and failed to reveal a plant’s practicalapplications the way local names did.

The order of chemistry: distilling impertinent erudition

While the dispute over the classification of lizards points to fundamental tensions inthe ‘‘becoming’’ of these objects for science*namely, in the very identity of theobjects* the next level of that ‘‘becoming’’, the internal constitution of the objects,was defined by chemistry. The scope of the chemical dispute was broad andambitious, and extended into such topics as the nature of chemical knowledge. Whatsparked it was the chemical analysis of lizards* the separation of the animal’s meatinto simpler substances through sublimation* performed by a pharmacist in May of

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 8 1

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

1782, under orders from the Protomedicato. The inclusion of this chemical study asconfirmation of the lizards’ harmfulness reflects the transition from Galenic tochemical medicine during the second half of the eighteenth century; this meant, inpart, the expansion in the types of substances used, the performance of increasinglycomplicated operations, and the use of sophisticated apparatus (De Vos in this issue).

The report summarizing the Protomedicato’s decision on lizards included asection that referred to lizards as venomous because they contained corrosive salts, asindicated by the greenish color resulting from the sublimation of lizard meat. In hisInstruccion , Leon y Gama conceded the theoretical and practical pertinence ofchemistry to medicine, but criticized both the methods and the results of theexperiment performed by the pharmacist. He charged the latter with ‘‘visualdelusion,’’ and in the second round of the debates accused him of an ‘‘error inunderstanding.’’ He ridiculed the assumption that a greenish solution was venomous;vegetable soups were also green. Moreover, Leon y Gama charged, animals did notcontain corrosive salts. He complained that the pharmacist did not use a thermometerand it was therefore impossible to know the temperature at which the lizard analysishad been performed. And he could hardly conceal his irritation with theindiscriminate use of words like effervescence, ebullition, and fermentation (whichdenoted distinct chemical processes) evident in the Protomedicato’s report on lizards(Instruccion 25�26; Respuesta 5� 28; Carta 4r� v).

At stake in Leon y Gama’s critique are conceptual shifts in the definition of whatconstituted a chemical experiment and how it could be performed. His insistence onusing precision instruments reveals a systematic concern with quantification inchemistry. ‘‘En un termometro de Fahrenheit, Boerhaave senala los grados de calorpara ejecutar las operaciones perfectamente. [. . .] ¿Se podra uno asegurar de estosgrados de fuego solo por un juicio prudente y sin la presencia del termometro? ¿Y sepodra contar por exacta una operacion [en la] que se ignora en que grados de fuego seexecuto?’’ Leon y Gama wondered (Respuesta 7). The need for quantification was adirect consequence of the mutable nature of matter itself: ‘‘las operaciones quımicasson tan delicadas que, por ligeros apices, por el mas o menos fuego, se pierden ydestruyen las sustancias. [. . .] Innumerables mutaciones puede padecer la materia porla diversidad de grados en la que se executo’’ (Respuesta 6), he declared, and thenpresented the reader with a fascinating list of such mutations. The heat-inducedmutations of eggs into volatile black powders or of lettuce into a highly poisonousalkaline substance stand out (Instruccion 38). Related to the problem of change wasthat of interpretation and naming, and Leon y Gama imparted to his audience anextensive lesson in the history of eighteenth-century chemistry as one of trial, error,and correction, as manifested by the revised editions of works by prominent chemistslike Lemery, Geoffroy, Homberg and Macquer.25 The bottom line, as Leon y Gamaclaimed in regard to the pharmacist’s analysis, was that no one who was not an expert,skilled in handling complex instruments, and versed in the latest chemical writings,could be trusted to correctly perform and interpret a chemical analysis.

Moreno and Sanchez replied that, in all fairness to pharmacists, their practiceincluded costly substances which they could not afford to waste. Hence, pharmacistsunderstood the value of precision. As for the problem at hand* the chemicalbreakdown of lizards for medical purposes* the pharmacist certainly had no need forthe history of chemistry or for the overwhelming number of ‘‘impertinent’’ facts

1 8 2 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

offered by Leon y Gama. ‘‘Hemos notado’’, declared the two surgeons, ‘‘que cuandoel Sr. Gama trata, aunque sea por incidencia algun punto quımico, derrama unaerudicion dilatadısima, aunque vulgar e impertinente’’ (Observaciones 20) They werepartly right. Leon y Gama’s interventions in the lizard controversy abounded in factsof all types. I have dwelt here on facts he drew from natural history and chemistry,but his text debates points as seemingly unrelated as spelling and punctuation, thespeed of sound, and magnetism. What struck Moreno and Sanchez as an impertinentand vulgar stylistic gesture was motivated by more than Leon y Gama’s vanity,however.

Mexico in the 1780s lacked the public spaces for the practice and demonstrationof science of which some European cities could boast. In Mexico there were nolecture halls, no museums, no public anatomical dissections, and no scientificsocieties. It was in print where most information of scientific content was divulgedand where scientific matters could be settled. This is evidenced by the large numberof debates fought out publicly in newspapers* often with the participation (throughletters) of the reading public*during the last two decades of the eighteenth century.Print thus became an exclusive space for public demonstration, where readers wereinvited to enter, take sides, accept or reject the arguments presented. Because thestakes were higher in printed Mexican debates, these seemed more derisive,aggressive, and histrionic, defiant of the decorum for polite conversation observed byEuropean debates. The writer-turned-actor (Moreno and Sanchez often complained ofLeon y Gama’s performance as ‘‘fingidas exclamaciones y asombros’’) commented,gesticulated, demanded attention and complicity for his case. ‘‘¿Que dirıaBoerhaave’’, exclaimed Leon y Gama at some point, ‘‘de ver al acido empyreumaticoconfundido con el aceite esencial? [. . .] La desapasionada inspeccion e inteligencia deVuestra Merced calificara si los puntos que yo trato de quımica son incidentes o si sonsobre la sustancia de la carta. Despues de todo esto, podran nuestros lectores juzgar silas invectivas que nos dirige allı son justas’’ (Carta 4v). The incidental points broughtup by the Creole scientist* and rejected by Moreno and Sanchez as sheererudition* functioned as evidence in the theater of proof, a theater in which itwas not just a question of analyzing the chemistry of lizard meat, but the virtuosity ofthe writer. The facts of a scientific culture shared by writer and enlightened readerwere meant to flatter and delight the latter in his participation in the exclusive andelite scientific culture, and thus, to maintain him as a grateful ally and partial judge inthe tribunal of reason.

Concluding remarks

By all accounts, the alleged healing powers of lizard meat did not congeal into a solidmedical fact to be listed in the standard pharmacopeia. After the initial euphoria, fewdoctors continued to prescribe lizards against the diseases they first hoped to cure.Jose Flores, the promoter of Guatemalan ‘‘specifick,’’ ‘‘forgot’’ to include theEspecıfico among his merits when he was applying for a position as Protomedico inGuatemala in 1793 (Lanning 482). The Spanish Crown did not promote thecommercialization of lizards, as it did that of other drugs it considered marketable,

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 8 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

such as quinine, and by the late 1780s, few European doctors continued toexperiment with the medical uses of lizard meat. Yet, even if the Mexican debates of1782� 1784 were not precisely a medical ‘‘success story’’, their importance lies less inmerely medical matters than in the ways in which these debates shaped andconfronted political, cultural, and professional identities and spelled out the codes andobjects of a Mexican scene of scientific inquiry. In other words, the heated exchangeshelped form new topics and practices, as well as agents who were or were notaccorded standing in learned culture.

One of the main protagonists to emerge with some notoriety out of the lizardcontroversies was Leon y Gama, a highly respected local scholar. Acclaim did nottranslate into financial or professional remuneration, however: for thirty years, heheld a lackluster bureaucratic government job*which, he bitterly complained, oftenprevented him from pursuing his more intellectual interests* and he was overlookedfor promotion to more rewarding positions (like that of professor of pyrotechnics atthe Seminario de Minerıa, a position he coveted) in favor of candidates recentlyarrived from Europe. Therefore, his participation in the lizard debates was a way todefine a space of learning where Creole skills were crucial and indispensable. Years oftraining in Nahuatl linguistics and of observing the practices of reserved and suspiciousIndians, as well as his vast knowledge of European sciences, made him especiallycapable of ‘‘discovering’’ and translating (otherwise unavailable) local secrets into thefacts avidly sought out by cosmopolitan scientists and by commercial speculators.More importantly, this Creole’s particular kind of scientific expertise and his workingknowledge of institutions and people gave him the authority to speak on behalf oflocal nature and to organize its study in ways no newcomer could pretend to do. Hisfrequent criticism of Moreno and Sanchez’s foreignness is not just the rhetoricalflourish of xenophobia, but a genuine expression of his desire to elevate indigenousand local knowledge to the status of science.

Leon y Gama’s opponents in this debate were two Spanish surgeons whodistrusted locally-embedded skills and doubted the value of local secrets in medicine.They had arrived in New Spain as envoys of the King and most likely felt responsiblefor preserving the Crown’s credibility as promoter and commercial agent of Americanmateria medica (Crawford in this issue). Yet, we must resist the temptation to cast thisdebate as a war between Creoles and Spaniards. It is more meaningful to considerMoreno and Sanchez’s interventions in the lizard debates as a stance in favor ofpractical and empirical medicine. While their arguments were principally aimed atLeon y Gama’s amateur incursion in medicine, it is likely that they weresimultaneously defending their professional standing as surgeons (i.e., those in directcontact with patients, bodies, and diseases) against a mightier enemy, one of the morerecalcitrant colonial institutions, the Protomedicato.

As we expand the focus of the lizard debates beyond the agendas of the peoplewho participated in them, what emerges is the project of determining the objects andpractices of Mexican scientific culture in terms that resist imperial subsumption. Thecontroversy of 1782� 1784 was the first of a series of public debates that involveddiscussions about the temperament of Mexico City, the city’s latitude and populationsize, and the analysis of newly-unearthed pre-Hispanic statuary. Despite their obviousdifferences, the debates have in common an interest in mapping out the distinctivefeatures of a Mexican Enlightenment culture: an engagement with local realities

1 8 4 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

(natural and man-made) and with the meaning of the pre-Hispanic heritage, anendeavor to make these the objects of public interest and discussion, and adetermination on the part of Creole scholars to profile themselves as interlocutors andparticipants in wider networks of information exchange and consumption. At thesame time, even when they confronted each other on opposite sides of an issue, theparticipants in these late eighteenth-century debates did so by appealing tothe sciences as ultimate arbiters of authority. In late eighteenth-century Mexico,science (predicated on a variety of skills that ranged from quantification andcomparison to observation and language study) became the condition for defining anatural, geographic, social, and linguistic space of difference.

We could take one more step back to ask how the Mexican space of difference canbe inserted into and related to contemporary imperial culture(s) of science. In itsmaterial dimensions, the lizard debates can be summarized as the accumulation ofhuman and non-human capital for the purposes of deciding if lizards cured certainillnesses. Traveling along separate exchange paths, objects and peoples coincidedin Mexico City: lizards (from Guatemala and the central Mexican Valley); letters(from around New Spain and Guatemala); instruments, books, and newspapers (fromEurope); lepers (from outside Mexico City); and trained medical personnel (mostlysent by the Spanish Crown, but also from France). In Mexico City, outsiders came upagainst social, cultural, and medical conditions, expectations, and uses which weretime and place specific: a strong indigenous presence, an urgent need for cures againstfatal diseases, and Creole intellectuals committed to recovering the secrets ofAmerican nature and equally interested in participating in a cosmopolitan scientificculture. In itself this density of people and man-made and natural objects isremarkable: it offers the historian an unprecedented scenario for examining how ‘‘bigscience’’ was being organized and carried out on the American side of the Atlantic andsuggests that, rather than moving along strict routes between the metropolis and theperipheries of the Spanish Empire, the making and distribution of knowledge involveda constellation of centers (that came in and out of prominence) around the Atlanticworld, connected by unsuspected and constantly-changing networks, and sustainingcomplex relationships with each other.

Notes

1 I would like to thank John Charles, Roger Gathman, Rodrigo Martinez, LuisSanchez Graillet, the members of the Seminario de Historia Intelectual at the UAM-Cuajimalpa (particularly Mario Barbosa, Mario Casanueva, Laura Chazarro, GeorgLeidenberg, Diego Mendez, Alvaro Pelaez, Estela Rosello, and Michael Schussler),as well as the several anonymous readers at the Journal for Spanish Cultural Studies forcomments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

2 The first edition of the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726� 1739) defines ‘‘especıfico’’as ‘‘el que es de una sola especie y sustancia, y no esta mezclado su compuesto conotra alguna y ası se dice de cualquier cosa como hierba, flor, fruto, &c. Que es unespecıfico, y de este termino usan mucho los Philosophos y Medicos, para expresarun medicamento o cosa simple. Lat. Specificum-i.’’ The contemporary Englishterm, ‘‘specifick’’ comes close to the Spanish definition: ‘‘That makes a thing of the

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 8 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

species of which it is. In medicine, appropriated to the cure of some particulardistemper’’ (Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language 1755).

3 Throughout this essay I will be employing eighteenth-century names to refer tospecific illness and will not attempt to interpret the symptoms discussed by variousdoctors according to modern-day nosologies.

4 Long neglected by historians of colonial science, Jose 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 Instruccionsobre el modo de practicar la inoculacion de las viruelas y metodo para curar esta enfermedad,acondicionado a la naturaleza y modo de vivir de los indios (1794), Flores reveals anawareness that the success of the campaign depended directly on making itharmonious with the practices and beliefs of the indigenous populations who wereto be inoculated. Among Flores’s accomplishments as chair of medicine at theuniversity were his articulated anatomical models (to make up for the absence orpoor conservation of cadavers available for dissection in Guatemala). In 1796 Floreswas appointed doctor of the King and left Guatemala for Madrid. Before arrivingthere he toured the United States, Havana, Holland, Flanders and France, where hecame in contact with some of the foremost scientists of his age. In Madrid, hecontinued to work on various projects, including optics and steam-power. To date,the only comprehensive study of Flores is by Aznar Lopez.

5 In 1783, lizard meat was administered to patients in hospitals in Malaga andGranada. A year later, Flores’s treatise was published in Turin, together with acollection of experiments and observations on Piemontese lizards, under the titleDel meraviglioso specifico delle lucertole o ramarri . An augmented edition of this textcame out in Venice in 1785. Similarly, the treatise was translated and published byFrancois Grasset in 1784 in Lausanne as Specifique simple, aise & de peu de depense,nouvellement decouvert dans le royaume de Guatimala. An expanded edition appeared in1785. For a brief overview of the Especıfico ’s reception in Europe, see MartınezDuran (294). I would like to thank Nuria Valverde for bringing to my attentionsome of the Spanish readings and uses of Flores?s treatise. The European readings ofthe Especıfico and the experiments on lizards performed there are topics for adifferent study.

6 The exception might be chocolate. Throughout the seventeenth century, variouswritings which addressed the question of whether chocolate broke the religious fast,also addressed the natural properties of chocolate, its medicinal uses, and its effectson the human body.

7 The bibliography on the lizard debates is minimal and has not been revised since the1950s. John Tate Lanning, whose archival work has been a valuable contributionto the history of Mexican medicine, includes an overview of the lizard debates(482� 486). See also Martınez Duran (293� 294).

8 The literature linking science and European imperial expansion is too extensive tocite here. For recent studies see Schiebinger and Swan, and Spary.

9 The literature of the past two decades includes a number of monographic studies, aswell as collections of essays on diverse aspects of science in the Spanish Empire. Ofparticular interest are Ciencia, vida y espacio en Iberoamerica (3 vols.) coordinated byJose Luis Peset (1989) and the number on ‘‘Nature and Empire’’ in the history ofscience journal Osiris (2000) with contributions by Juan Pimentel, AntonioLafuente, Alberto Elena, and Javier Ordonez. More recently, in 2006, the

1 8 6 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

prominent journal Isis conceded a small space to the discussion of ‘‘colonialscience,’’ with notes by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Steven Harris.

10 For notable recent exceptions, see Paula De Vos’s history of pharmacy in New Spainand Mauricio 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 patentlyinfluenced by Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘‘science in action’’, which follows theactivity 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 sciencehas tended to reduce local scientists (those who do not work in the ‘‘centers ofcalculation’’) into informants, as most Creoles were represented only in relationshipto Malaspina’s or to Humboldt’s passage through different Spanish colonies at theend of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Throughout thisessay, I will be arguing for a wider application of Latour’s model, as it tracks themaking, transmission, and transaction of scientific information and artifacts acrossthe dense, multi-nodal network that made up the scenes of inquiry across theAtlantic World.

12 Unless otherwise noted, the following account of the lizard controversies isreconstructed on basis of various ‘‘expedientes’’ in vol. 4706 (‘‘Experimentos concarne de lagartijas’’), Ramo Ayuntamiento, Archivo Historico del Distrito Federal(AHDF), Mexico.

13 In his study of the Protomedicato in New Spain, Lanning pointed out that thelegislature was not clear as to where the City Council’s jurisdiction on medicalmatters (primarily of public health concern) began and where the Protomedicatotook over. This lack of clarity often lent itself to conflicts between these twoinstitutions.

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 ofGarcıa de la Vega’s more comprehensive treatise on lizards, where he addressestopics in natural history, chemistry, and indigenous pharmacology.

15 For the various conflicts between Moreno and the Protomedicato, see VelascoCeballos. In the early modern era, surgery, closely dependent on practice andempirical observation, had been more progressive but much less prestigious thanuniversity-taught medicine, which relied fundamentally on a textual traditiontraceable to Galen and Hippocrates. It was at the end of the eighteenth century,however, with the institutionalization of surgery and the creation of schools, thatthe Protomedicato started reacting more antagonistically against surgeons likeMoreno.

16 Alonso de Carriola had trained in Cadiz at the Real Seminario de Cirugıa, where heprobably knew Moreno, before he became chief surgeon (‘‘primer cirujano’’) ofthe Armada and eventually settled down in Guatemala. It is important to underlineepistolary relations of this sort, for they suggest unsuspected channels along whichscientific information traveled between eighteenth-century Spanish American cities,outside the more acknowledged circuits that linked the colonies with themetropolis.

17 I thank Nancy Vogeley for bringing this manuscript to my attention and for makingit available to me.

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 8 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

18 The expression ‘‘coming into being of scientific objects’’ (Daston, 1999) impliesthat, rather than primary ontological entities, the objects of scientific research aredelimited and defined as objects of study. They ‘‘come into being’’ (become salient)and they disappear under circumstances which cannot be limited to ‘‘scientific’’ orepistemic considerations. As such, writing the biography of any scientific objectwould imply taking into account the concrete histories of social, political, cultural,ideological or technological confrontations and interactions that shaped thatparticular object as an object of scientific study.

19 One might note here that the human body was still considered a microcosm ofevents taking place on a higher, macrocosmic level, hence the tight relationshipbetween 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 fieldsof study, see Siraisi.

20 Garcıa de la Vega reinforced a myth powerful throughout the sixteenth tonineteenth centuries, that of American Indians as one of the lost tribes of Israel. Themedicinal uses of lizards, pyramid building and hieroglyphic writing by both Oldand New World peoples were referenced to bolster that theory.

21 In this respect, Leon y Gama’s work is recognized as a precursor to modern Nahuastudies. He learnt Nahuatl in order to understand ancient Mexican astronomy andchronology, as present in extant codices. In 1792, he tested his knowledge whentwo spectacular archaeological pieces were unearthed in the Mexican central plaza.At the same time, Leon y Gama began a detailed botanical dictionary (his thirty orso pages did not take him beyond letter ‘‘A’’), now in the Biliotheque Nationale deFrance, where the plant names were given in Nahuatl and the descriptions inSpanish.

22 The persistence of ‘‘pseudoscience’’ in the scientific practices of foremost Westernscientists has come to the fore lately in historical studies of Newton’s alchemy orKepler’s astrology. For a discussion on the accommodation of traditional systems ofknowledge and modernity in the case of Spanish science, see Hill and PerezMagallon, among others.

23 In an influential collection of essays, Clark, Golinski and Schaffer make thepersuasive case that the traditional, defining differences in the historiography of theEuropean Enlightenment (the opposition between science and imagination, religion,tradition) should be dissolved in favor of more detailed studies of local, oftenperipheral scenes of inquiry. The essays collected in their anthology reflectdivergent meanings of the Enlightenment. For similar analyses in the Spanish-speaking world, see Hill and Perez Magallon.

24 In an article on Linnaeus’s ‘‘translation’’ of local plants into the constant specimensof universal taxonomy, historian Staffan Muller-Wille arrives at a similar conclusion:‘‘a multitude of viewpoints, exchanges, and the formation of specific languages atthe boundaries between groups form the material condition of knowledge, and notits limits’’ (484). The relationship between indigenous forms of knowledge andEuropean science has been the subject of a series of recent studies. See particularlySchiebinger and Grove.

25 The heterogenous epistemological, experimental, and linguistic practices that madeup seventeenth and eighteenth century chemistry, prior to the so-called ChemicalRevolution of the late 1780s, have been the subject of a number of important

1 8 8 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

studies, which include Maurice Crossland’s classic Historical Studies in the Language ofChemistry , Frederic Lawrence Holmes’s Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an InvestigativeEnterprise , and Ursula Klein’s ‘‘The Chemical Workshop Tradition and theExperimental Practice: Discontinuities Within Continuities.’’

Works cited

Primary texts

Archivo Historico del Distrito Federal. Ramo Ayuntamiento. Vol. 4706: ‘‘Experimen-toscon carne de lagartijas.’’

Academia dei Lincei. Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus . Rome, 1651.Esteyneffer, Juan de. Florilegio medicinal de todas las enfermedades . Mexico, 1712.Flores, Francisco. Especıfico Nuevamente Descubierto en el Reyno de Goatemala, para la curacion

radical del horrible mal de cancro y otros mas frecuentes. Mexico, 1782.Garcıa de la Vega. Joseph Vicente. Discurso crıtico sobre el uso de las Lagartijas como Especıfico

contra muchas enfermedades . Mexico, 1782.Hernandez, Francisco. ‘‘Historia de los reptiles de Nueva Espana.’’ Obras Completas. Vol. 3.

Ed. German Somolinos d’Ardois. Mexico: UNAM, 1959.Leon y Gama, Antonio de. Instruccion sobre el remedio de las Lagartijas . Mexico, 1782.** . Respuesta Satisfactoria a la Carta Apologetica que Escribieron el Lic. D. Manuel Antonio

Moreno y el Br. D. Alejo Ramon Sanchez . Mexico, 1783.** . Carta que sobre las observaciones crıtico-apolegeticas del Sr. D. Manuel Antonio Moreno y

Br. Alejo Ramon Sanchez escribıa a un Amigo . Manuscript Division of Bancroft Library.University of California at Berkeley. Ms. 125.

Lopez de Hinojosos, Alonso. Summa y recopilacion de cirugıa . Mexico, 1578.Lopez, Gregorio. Tesoro de las medicinas y demas yerbas . Mexico, 1671.Moreno, Manuel Antonio and Alejo Ramon Sanchez. Carta Apologetica de las Reflexiones

sobre el Uso de las Lagartijas . Mexico, 1782.** . Observaciones Crıtico-Apologeticas, sobre la Respuesta Satisfactoria de D. Antonio de Leon y

Gama y la Instruccion sobre el remedio de las Lagartijas, del mismo autor . Mexico, 1783.Nieremberg, Johann Eusebius. Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae . Antwerp, 1635.Valmont de Bomare, Jacques Christophe. Dictionnaire raisonne d’histoire naturelle. Paris,

1768.Ximenez, Francisco. Quatro libros de la naturaleza . Mexico, 1615.

Secondary texts

Alvarez Pelaez, Raquel. ‘‘Estudio Introductoria.’’ De Materia Medica Novae Hispaniae . ElManuscrito de Recchi. 1582. Aranjuez, Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles, 1998. 6�98.

Aznar Lopez, Jose. Jose Felipe Flores, Cientıfico chiapaneco de la Ilustracion Hispanoamericana .Mexico: Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Chiapas, 1998.

Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: the Spanish American Empire and the EarlyScientific Revolution. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006.

Bellingeri, Marco. ‘‘Nuevo mundo y mundo nuevo: la Academia de los Linceos y el Tesoromexicano (1604� 1651).’’ Historias 30 (Apr.� Sept. 1993): 37�50.

Clark, William, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe .Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999.

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 8 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

Cook, Harold J. ‘‘Physicians and Natural History.’’ Cultures of Natural History . Eds.N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, J.A., and E.C. Spary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.91� 105.

Crossland, Maurice P. Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry . London: Heinemann,1962.

Daston, Lorraine. ‘‘Introduction: The Coming into being of Scientific Objects.’’Biographies of Scientific Objects . Ed. Daston. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150� 1750. NewYork: Zone Books, 1998.

De Vos, Paula. ‘‘The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the EarlySpanish Empire.’’ Journal of World History 17.4 (2006): 399� 429.

** . ‘‘The Art of Pharmacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mexico.’’ Diss.University of California, Berkeley, 2001.

Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early ModernItaly . Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Genette, Gerard. Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie . Paris: Le Seuil, 1976.Grove, Richard. ‘‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for

Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Knowledge.’’ Modern Asia Studies30.1 (1996): 121� 143.

Harris, Steven J. ‘‘Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography ofKnowledge.’’ Configurations 6.2 (1998): 269� 304.

Hill, Ruth. Scepters and the Sciences in the Spains. Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca.1680� 1740) . Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2000.

Holmes, Frederic Lawrence. Eighteenth-Century Chemistry as an Investigative Enterprise .Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Jardine, Nicholas. The Scenes of Inquiry. On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences . Oxford:Oxford UP, 1991.

Klein, Ursula. ‘‘The Chemical Workshop Tradition and the Experimental Practices:Discontinuities Within Continuities.’’ Science in Context 9 (1996): 251� 287.

Lanning, John Tate. El Real Protomedicato. La reglementacion de la profesion medica en el Imperioespanol. Ed. John Jay TePaske. Trans. Miriam de los Angeles Dıaz Cordoba and JoseLuis Soberanes Fernandez. Mexico: UNAM, 1997.

Latour, Bruno. ‘‘Drawing Things Together.’’ Representation in Scientific Practice . Ed.Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.19� 68.

** . Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society . Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1987.

MacLeod, Roy, Ed. ‘‘Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise’’. Osiris ,2nd ser. 15 (2000).

Martınez Duran, Carlos. Las ciencias medicas en Guatemala. Origen y evolucion . Guatemala:Tipografıa nacional, 1945.

Moreno de los Arcos, Roberto. ‘‘Ensayo bibliografico de Antonio de Leon y Gama.’’Boletın del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliograficas 2.1 (January� June 1970).

Muller-Wille, Staffan. ‘‘Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland:Center and Periphery in Linnean Botany.’’ Science in Context 16.4 (2003): 462� 487.

Nieto Olarte, Mauricio. Orden natural y orden social . Madrid: Doce Calles, forthcoming2007.

1 9 0 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014

** . Remedios para el imperio: historia natural y la apropiacion del nuevo mundo . Bogota:Instituto Colombiano de Antropologıa e Historia, 2000.

Perez Magallon, Jesus. Construyendo la modernidad. La cultura espanola en tiempo de losnovatores (1675� 1725). Madrid: Centro Superior de Investigaciones Cientıficas,2002.

Pomian, Krysztof. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVe-XVIIIe siecle . Paris:Gallimard, 1987.

Rodriguez-Sala, Marıa Luisa. Los Cirujanos de Hospitales de la Nueva Espana (siglos XVI yXVII) . Mexico: UNAM, 2005.

Rudwick, Martin. The Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge AmongGentlemanly Specialists . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Samoaya, Marianne. ‘‘More than Quacks: Seeking Medical Care in Late Colonial NewSpain.’’ Social History of Medicine , 19.1 (2005): 1� 18.

Schiebinger, Londa, ed. ‘‘Focus: Colonial Science.’’ Isis 96.1 (2005): 52� 87.** . Plants and Empire. Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World . Cambridge: Harvard

UP, 2004.Schiebinger, Londa, and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics .

Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump . Princeton: Princeton UP,

1985.Siraisi, Nancy. ‘‘Medicine and the Renaissance World of Learning.’’ Bulletin for the History

of Medicine 78 (2004): 1� 36.Spary, Emma. ‘‘ ‘Peaches Which the Patriarchs Lacked’: Natural History, Natural

Resources, and Natural Economy in France.’’ History of Political Economy , annualsupplement to vol. 35 (2003): 14� 41.

** . Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution . Chicago: U ofChicago P, 2000.

Velasco Ceballos, Romulo. La cirugıa mexicana en el siglo XVIII. Mexico: Archivo Historicode la Secretarıa de Salubridad, 1946.

M A K I N G L I Z A R D S I N T O D R U G S 1 9 1

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

07:

00 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014