Early Latin American Medicine in the NLM Collections

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EARLY LATIN AMERICAN MEDICINE IN THENLM COLLECTIONSPOSTED BY CIRCULATING NOW ON OCTOBER 8, 2014 IN COLLECTIONS, NEWS, RAREBOOKS & JOURNALS | 2 COMMENTS

Michael J. North spoke today at the National Library of Medicine inrecognition of Hispanic Heritage Month on “Early Latin AmericanMedicine in the NLM Collections.” Mr. North is Head of Rare Books andEarly Manuscripts in the History of Medicine Division of the NationalLibrary of Medicine. Circulating Now interviewed him about his work.

Circulating Now: Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from?What do you do? What is your typical workday like?

MN: A love of languages, as wellas the history of medicine,brought me into the world ofrare books. I was a Greek majoras an undergraduate and a Latinminor, and I also read French,Spanish, Portuguese, andItalian. I moved to Washington,

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DC, after college and got a job atGeorgetown University Library’sSpecial Collections, in large partbecause the University wasfounded by Jesuits, so a lot of itsolder materials were in Latin.While working there, I got aMaster’s degree in TheoreticalLinguistics, which is basicallygrammar and phonology, two of my favorite things about Greek andLatin. In Library School at the Catholic University of America, I was ableto focus on the book arts, or rare books, which had long been my maininterest over archives and other special collections formats.

As the Head of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts at the Library, I amessentially the curator of this enormous and varied collection ofmaterials from all over the world and spanning almost ten centuries. Ilead a staff with expertise in cataloging rare books, conservation, andproviding reference services to users both onsite and offsite. During atypical week we may deal with issues ranging from describing a uniquemedieval manuscript on veterinary medicine, to answering a queryfrom Japan about a 17th-century book on acupuncture, to adjustingthe humidity in a collection area and repairing a damaged binding. Weare also in the midst of digitizing a great deal of the collection, with aspecial focus now on early American books, including our oldest LatinAmerican titles.

CN: In your lecture today on “Early Latin American Medicine in the NLMCollections” you provided an overview of NLM’s book holdings of LatinAmerican titles from 1607 to the present. Give us a sense of the scopeof the collection.

MN: The NationalLibrary ofMedicine hasbeen in businessfor over 175years, and formost of that we

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Pharmaceutical advertisement in Nahuatl

printed in Mexico City, circa 1774.

have beencollecting notonly books abouthealth andmedicine fromthe United States,but also booksfrom all over theworld. This hasincludedthousands ofbooks relating toor published inLatin America.Beginning in the1850s, thismaterial wasoften collected as

it was published, so it came to the Library new. Later in the 19thcentury, however, the Library began to purchase historical textsbecause administrators like John Shaw Billings knew that modernmedicine had to be put into context with its history in order to get acomplete picture. The majority of our Latin American books come fromMexico, the primary center of Latin American medicine through muchof the past three hundred years, and where, in 1570, the first medicalbook in the New World was published. Other centers of publishinghave been Peru, Brazil, and Argentina, but we have early materialsfrom nearly everywhere, including what is now Haiti. Topics rangewidely from formal academic medicine to treatises on childbirth,smallpox vaccination, and yellow fever epidemics.

CN: What were some of the issues that had an impact on medicalpublishing in early Latin America?

MN: One of the major issues affecting medical publishing in LatinAmerica, especially during the early period in the 16th and 17thcenturies, was the heavy control of the printing press by the CatholicChurch and the colonial governments, so that most publishing takingplace was related to religion or governance for the first 100 years. Also

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Traité de la culture du nopal, et de l’éducation de la cochenille

dans les colonies françaises de l’Amérique: précédé d’un

voyage a Guaxaca, 1787

during this time, nearly all supplies relating to printing had to beimported from Europe, including paper. So printing was often bothheavily censored and expensive.

Othercontemporaryissues includethe explorationand catalogingof native plantspecies fortheir economicand medicaluses, as well astopics thatappeared allover the NewWorld in the19th centurysuch as theintroduction of smallpox vaccination and translations of French andGerman medical texts into local languages.

CN: Tell us about some of the authors of these books, what are theirstories?

MN: Agustín Farfan was a physician who had come to Mexico fromSpain and subsequently became an Augustinian monk and missionary.Farfan’s Tratado Breve de Medicina y de Todas las Enfermedades, orBrief Treatise on Medicine and all Illnesses, was very popular andcame out in three editions beginning in 1579. NLM has a copy of thethird edition of the book, printed in 1610. It includes chapters on manycommon ailments such as fevers and dysentery. There is also a chapteron smallpox, which he notes as an extremely deadly disease that hadbeen causing the deaths of thousands of native Mexicans in thedecades before his book was published; he believed smallpox wascaused by corrupted blood and advised bloodletting as a treatment.

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Another interesting personality is Benita Paulina Cadeau de Fessel,called “Madama.” She was a professionally trained midwife from Pariswho immigrated to New Orleans, Mexico, and finally ended up in Limain about 1820, where she founded and headed up La Maternidad, aschool of midwifery. We have four items by her, mainly manuals ofmidwifery, and they have some interesting but somewhat crudecopperplate engravings for illustrations. The item below on the right isfrom a case report by Madama concerning a woman with an extra-uterine pregnancy. I believe that these are the oldest items we havefrom Latin America that were authored by a woman.

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CN: The collections in your care are used by scholars and researchersevery day, how would you encourage the public to explore thecollection?

MN: A majority of our Latin American books dating up to about 1880have been digitized and are available free through NLM’s DigitalCollections online archive. An easy way to access many of these LatinAmerican materials is to sort the materials by clicking on “Languages”in the box on the lower left labeled “Refine By.” There you can select agroup of over 300 items in Portuguese or over 260 items in Spanish.The Library continues to scan materials from Latin America in theselanguages and adds to the Digital Collection daily. You can also contactme directly at [email protected] or the History of Medicine DivisionReference Desk at [email protected].

Michael J. North’s presentation was part of our ongoing history ofmedicine lecture series, which promotes awareness and use of NLMand other historical collections for research, education, and publicservice in biomedicine, the social sciences, and the humanities.

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ROBERT KAPANJIEOCTOBER 8, 2014The most famous Latin American medicinal of plant originis of course that which is found in the bark of thecinchona tree. This is quinine which has saved thousands

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because of malaria. It is seldom used nowadays becauseof potent synthetic substitutes and the fact that it cancause heart arrythmias, similar to quinidine.

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MICHAEL NORTHOCTOBER 14, 2014Thank you for the comment. Yes, the bark of the cinhonatree was a great boon in the treatment of malaria;originally used by Native Americans in the Andean tropicsas a muscle relaxant, European physicians discovered itsuse for malaria in the 17th century. You can see someearly texts about the plant in NLM’s Digital Collections siteby performing a keyword searches on “cinchona” and“bark”: http://collections.nlm.nih.gov.

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