The Mexican Treasury: the Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernandez.
Jaffary, Nora
The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernandez,
edited by Simon Varey, translated by Rafael Chabran, Cynthia L.
Chamberlin, and Simon Varey. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2000. xix, 281 pp. $65.00 U.S. (cloth).
Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr.
Francisco Hernandez, edited by Simon Varey, Rafael Chabran, and Dora B.
Weiner. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2000. xvi, 229
pp. $60.00. (cloth).
In 1570, King Philip II commissioned one of Spain's leading
physicians, Francisco Hernandez (1515-87), to travel to New Spain and
write a botanical treatise cataloguing the natural history of
Spain's new world holdings and assessing the medicinal usefulness
of the territory's natural resources. Over the next eight years,
Hernandez painstakingly produced his monumental sixteen-volume (six of
text, ten of painted illustrations) Natural History of New Spain. While
overseas, he also completed his Spanish translation of Pliny the
elder's Natural History, wrote an ethnographic volume on the
indigenous populations of central Mexico entitled the Antiquities of New
Spain, as well as composing a missionary poem, a practical index of
medications used in New Spain, and several other works of botanical and
medical import. Hernandez's writings contain valuable information
about the botanical world of New Spain and about indigenous medical
knowledge, but his significant influence on intellectual traditions in
Mexico and in Europe have been seriously under-acknowledged.
Hernandez's texts were not published during his lifetime and the
complete Natural History has never been published in any language, with
only a small portion of it previously appearing in English. Simon Varey
and his co-editors have begun the process of rectifying his absence from
the historical record in this two volume collection, which contains a
selection of Hernandez's writings and a number of insightful
articles dealing with the sixteenth-century intellectual context from
which he emerged, and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century climates
which his writings helped shape.
The history of the dissemination of his writings is one of the
central foci of both volumes. The Mexican Treasury opens with a
discussion of the surviving portions of Hernandez's texts residing
in archival collections, the editorial transformations that published
selections from the late sixteenth century to the twentieth have
undergone, and the influences of Hernandez's works on other authors
in Latin America and Europe. This introduction is followed by a
well-chosen selection of writings. Varey has included copies of
Philip's Instructions to Hernandez, in which he requests him to
"consult, wheresoever you go, all the doctors, medicine men,
herbalists, Indians, and other persons" with botanical knowledge of
Spain's newly acquired territories (Mexican Treasury, p. 46). Varey
also includes the twelve letters Hernandez wrote to the king while in
Mexico, reporting on the progress of (and obstacles to) his work.
Initially, his principle concern was to plead for more time and the
larger budget he required to complete his work, but beginning in 1575,
he implored the king to allow him to return to Spain and ensure the safe
transmission and publication of his writings there. There is also a copy
of Hernandez's will, and excerpts from the writings mentioned
above. These selections are followed by others from other authors,
including the seventeenth-century Mexican luminary Agustin Vetancourt
and the Dutch scholar and geographer Johannes de Laet, who are known to
have borrowed directly or indirectly from Hernandez's compositions
in their own works. The most detailed representations of
Hernandez's own writings are contained in his descriptions of five
key new world crops: cacao, chili, corn, tobacco, and tomato. His
careful depictions of these plants, as with those of more strictly
medicinal interest, give the reader a real sense, as Varey describes, of
Hernandez "squatting on his haunches, rubbing a leaf between finger
and thumb, sniffing a piece of cut fruit, cautiously licking a
potentially poisonous berry" (Searching for the Secrets, p. 37).
Hernandez is most praising of corn, even hinting of the grain's
possible superiority to wheat. In one moment, he notes that its merits
have induced Spaniards, mestizos, Africans, and mulattos to all become
enthusiastic consumers of the crop, but in the next, perhaps perceiving
a need to condemn this manifestation of the cultural intermingling of
new world populations, he writes: "To what depths of vileness have
our customs sunk that such diverse races can unite in vice!"
(Mexican Treasury, p. 112).
The significance of the primary source documents selected in The
Mexican Treasury is much enhanced by the articles collected in The
Secrets of Nature. Historians concerned with the medical and
intellectual history of Latin America will find both volumes a welcome
addition to their collections. These essays illuminate our understanding
of both spheres of the Columbian exchange. We see how the intellectual
atmosphere of the Spanish Renaissance, epitomized in the medical school
at the University of Alcal, framed the ways that medical practitioners
could perceive the natural world and the inhabitants of New Spain. We
also learn that this new world did challenge and renovate some of
Hernandez's traditional modes of perception, for he adopted
indigenous systems of taxonomy and classification in the organization of
his text. And we are able to trace some of the influences of this newly
acquired knowledge about Mexico's flora and fauna as it was
disseminated in the scientific, humanistic, and even artistic traditions
of Western Europe from the sixteenth century to the present.
Many of the authors in this volume touch on one of the central
controversies for Hernandez scholars: why it took so long for his
writings to be published. The most straight-forward explanation,
supported by Jos M. Lopez Pinero and Jos Pardo Toms, is that he was
simply in too grave a state of health to oversee the publication of the
works himself. A more controversial interpretation is offered by Carmen
Benito-Vessels, who argues that Philip's delayed publication of
Hernandez's writings was an act of censorship, provoked by the
monarch's suspicion of Hernandez's heretical God-like
"naming" of new world flora and fauna, as well by
Hernandez's perceived association with Judaizers. David
Boruchoff's thoughtful contribution to the volume is a discussion
of how Hernandez was able to reconcile his own medical training with
Nahua knowledge related to healthcare. He argues that unlike some of his
contemporaries, including Benardino de Sahagun, Hernandez did not treat
Nahua knowledge as a body of ritualized thought unconnected to rational
decisions made by individual thinkers. He tended, instead, to
"reorder the Nahua's rites of passage in accordance with
[European] medical and scientific criteria" (Secrets of Nature, p.
92). Rather than viewing the Nahuas and their modes of thinking as
essentially distinctive from European scientific rationalism, Boruchoff
suggests that Hernandez attributed to them scientific, rational
abilities. Boruchoff's conclusions may be used to provide weight to
the argument that one of the reasons Hernandez's writings were so
tardily published was that (whether accurately or not), they were
thought to contain too many indicators of his approbation of indigenous
knowledge and ways of thinking.
Nora Jaffary
University of Northern Iowa
