gems, jade, Broken Bangle

Boxer examines the lives and achievements of the sixteenth-century Iberian physicians Garcia d’Orta and Nicolás Monardes, presenting them as pioneers of tropical medicine and pharmacognosy. D’Orta, a Portuguese physician of Spanish-Jewish descent who settled in Goa, based his Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinais da Índia (1563) on direct observation, practical experience, and information obtained from Indian, Muslim, and other Asian physicians and traders, frequently correcting the classical authorities when their accounts conflicted with what he observed. His work treats Asian materia medica and commercial substances, including aloes, camphor, sandalwood, betel, ivory, diamonds, and bezoar stones, and contains an important early European clinical description of Asiatic cholera. Monardes, a physician in Seville who never visited America, similarly investigated medicinal products arriving from the New World, including tobacco, coca, sarsaparilla, sassafras, and other drugs, publishing his findings in works that achieved wide European circulation. Boxer challenges the suggestion that Monardes’s early writings on American materia medica were influenced by d’Orta, arguing that the chronology makes this unlikely and that Monardes’s changing views developed through his own experience. He compares the two physicians’ empirical methods and independent judgment and traces the dissemination of their work through the Latin translations and adaptations of Carolus Clusius, which made their discoveries accessible throughout Europe. An appendix provides a detailed bibliographical study of the exceptionally rare 1563 Goa edition of d’Orta’s Colóquios, including its printing variants and surviving copies. Boxer concludes that, despite the obsolete medical concepts of their age, d’Orta and Monardes were outstanding pioneers whose careful observation and study of Asian and American drugs gave them an enduring place in the history of pharmacognosy.