Methodological Challenges Involved in Compiling the Nahua Pharmacopeia
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HOS0010.1177/0073275317712139History of ScienceDe Vos 712139research-article2017 Special Issue: Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies HOS History of Science 2017, Vol. 55(2) 210 –233 Methodological challenges © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: involved in compiling the sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317712139DOI: 10.1177/0073275317712139 Nahua pharmacopeia journals.sagepub.com/home/hos Paula De Vos San Diego State University, USA Abstract Recent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center– periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre- contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome. Keywords Nahua, Nahuatl, medicine, pharmacy, pharmacopeia, pharmacology, methodology, colonial Mexico, Florentine Codex, Sahagún, Badianus Manuscript, Relaciones, Francisco Hernández, global history of science Over the last decade, the field of Iberian colonial science has expanded dramatically, with many valuable contributions from scholars in Europe and the Americas. Much of that work has focused on the relationship between science and empire, documenting the role of the imperial state in the gathering and construction of scientific knowledge, often with the goal of exploiting natural resources for economic gain. Work in the field has also targeted local and regional knowledge networks in the colonies, emphasizing the Corresponding author: Paula De Vos, History Department, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-6050, USA. Email: [email protected] De Vos 211 originality and dynamism of knowledge production outside the European context. Recent work in the Americas has also highlighted interaction between indigenous and coloniz- ing peoples, and the fact that colonizers relied upon indigenous knowledge, especially in the first decades after contact. These efforts parallel a larger movement within the history of science to expand beyond the Eurocentrism that has dominated much of the field over the past century, despite the intentions of its early founders.1 Several journal fora have convened to discuss the issue, resulting in a number of thoughtful reflections and discussions about the state of the field, its future prospects, and the multiple challenges that a more global approach to the history of science entails.2 One prevailing issue involves the tension between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ – how to integrate a widening scope that includes local contexts without losing coherence in the field, and how to examine knowledge traditions outside of Europe with- out using European concepts and categories as the starting point of analysis. With regard to these issues, authors in the field have intentionally challenged earlier ‘diffusionist’ arguments about the flow of knowledge and knowledge production from European ‘center’ to colonial ‘periphery’, arguing instead for other ways of viewing knowledge production – through ‘multiple metropoli’, global networks, or ‘centers of calculation’ that emphasize the flow of knowledge through concepts of circulation, contact zones, or zones of trade.3 Such concepts serve to displace Europe as the (only) center of an excep- tional scientific tradition – but the messy complexity of these interactions necessitates that historians of science also take into account the disjunctures, interruptions, confusions, and unequal power relations that this flow entailed as well. 1. See Fa-Ti Fan, “The Global Turn in the History of Science,” EASTS 6 (2010): 249–58. 2. See Sujit Sivasundaram, “Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory,” Isis 101:1 (2010): 146–58; Stuart McCook, “Introduction,” Isis 104:4 (2013): 773–6; Carla Nappi, “The Global and Beyond: Adventures in the Local Historiographies of Science,” Isis 104:1 (2013): 102–10; and Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33:1 (2009): 9–30. Within the same vein are other edited collections: Laszlo Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (eds.), Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittburgh Press, 2016). I would like to thank Matthew Crawford for pointing out these paral- lels and suggesting these readings to me. 3. See above citations as well as Roy McLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5:3 (1982): 1–16 and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). These gener- ally argue against George Basalla’s model of the diffusion of western science in “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611–22. Recent work has also emphasized the work of go-betweens and intermediaries and the kinds of negotiations that took place within these processes. See, for example, Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj and James Delbourgo (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009) and James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2007). 212 History of Science 55(2) One of the major issues confronting historians who wish to expand beyond Eurocentrism in the history of science lies in the documentary base available – the asym- metrical availability of documentation created by and for Europeans that thus tends to favor European voices and perspectives.4 This is the case for colonial Latin America, in which the pre-contact documentary record is relatively sparse. In Mesoamerica, for example, only a few pre-contact pictorial manuscripts, or codices, have survived, so that historians must rely almost exclusively on written sources produced after conquest and within the colonial regime for knowledge regarding pre-contact Mesoamerican society. This is especially true for the history of medicine among the Nahua, for which the most valuable Nahua sources depicting pre-contact practices were all produced in the first fifty years or so following the fall of Tenochtitlan to Cortés in 1521, and all within the framework and with the support of the colonial regime. These sources are very valuable and have allowed historians and anthropologists to trace the outlines of Nahua medical theory and some practice, but the nature of the docu- ments and their colonial provenance require that scholars approach them with caution and a deep understanding of the context in which they were produced. Issues of lan- guage, translation, and codification, moreover, have hindered our ability to gain a syn- thetic understanding of the Nahua pharmacopeia or its ‘materia medica’: the collection of substances used as medicines to treat disease. Using the sources available, ethnobota- nists have produced encyclopedic reference works that seek careful identification of and scientific nomenclature for the medicinal plants they specify.5 Alternatively, chemists have carried out chemical analyses to determine the bioactivity for a limited number of individual substances.6 The encyclopedic works, written by and designed for ethnophar- macologists, ethnobotanists, and herbalists, list and describe each of the hundreds of substances in use. The studies of the chemical properties of a handful of Nahua materia medica, conversely, do not give an adequate sense of its breadth and versatility, nor do their authors explain how or why those particular substances were selected out of the 4. Sivasundaram, “Sciences and the Global,” in particular addresses this issue. 5. See, for example, Karen Cowan Ford, Las yerbas de la gente: A Study of Hispano-American Medicinal Plants (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1975); Maximinio Martínez, Las plantas medicinales de Mexico, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Sociedad Herbolaria de America, 2010); Xavier Lozoya and Mariana Lozoya, Flora medicinal de México, primera parte: Plantas indigenas (Mexico: IMSS, 1982); Paul C. Standley, Trees and Shrubs of Mexico (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1967); the many publications of Robert Bye; Margarita Artschwager Kay, Healing with Plants in the American and Mexican West (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Paul Hersch, Plantas medicinales: Relato de una posibil- itdad confiscada. El estatuto e la flora en la biomedicine Mexicana (México: INAH, 2000); and Atlas de las plantas de la medicina tradicional Mexicana: Atlas of Plants of Mexican Indigenous Medicine (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1994). 6. See Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, “Empirical Aztec Medicine,” Science 188:4185 (1975): 215–20;