2 Had you walked on, you would have encountered more quarters, with more shelves, holding boxes with the wood and resin of palo santo – the Spanish term for guaiacum – and sarsaparilla root, a Honduran and Jamaican species of smilax, both of them long hailed as anti-syphilitics, with chests of curled cinnamon bark and the greens of canchalagua, a ‘blood purifier’. 1 Had you looked across the room, you could have seen another, larger shelf just opposite the entrance, holding tins of liquidambar, another balsam, a jar of coconut oil and Campeche amber. There would also have been cases holding the brittle resin of copal, as well as covered pitchers enclosing black and white ‘Peruvian balsam’ and Maria Oil balsam, both exudations from the trunk of trees that were administered in wound treatments and chest ailments. The shelf just above the stairway through which you arrived would have held Peruvian calaguala, contrayerva – then hailed as an antidote – and several chests of mechoacán, a mild purgative – renamed jalap root by the colonists for its abundance in the Xalapa region. Had you entered the storehouse of Spain’s Royal Pharmacy in Madrid sometime in the late eighteenth century, you could have seen one of the world’s richest and most complete collections of medicinal plants extracted from the crown’s American possessions – plants that were ‘known and trafficked’ around the world at the time. Ultimately and primarily, however, it was because the disease environments of these widely separated places, their medical systems and materia medica had long become entangled by the eighteenth century. Inquiring into the causes of the global ‘spread’ of American remedies, it argues that medicinal plants like ipecacuanha, guaiacum, sarsaparilla, jalap root and cinchona moved with relative ease into Parisian medicine chests, Moroccan court pharmacies and Manila dispensaries alike, because of their ‘exotic’ charisma, the force of centuries-old medical habits, and the increasingly measurable effectiveness of many of these plants by the late eighteenth century. It maps the routes used to transport the plants from Spanish America to Europe and, along the arteries of European commerce, colonialism and proselytism, into societies across the Americas, Asia and Africa. This article outlines the history of the commerce in medicinal plants and plant-based remedies from the Spanish American territories in the eighteenth century.
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