Something Old In Something New: Construction of European Identity In The New World Via Conceptions of Pain And The Biocolonial Tendencies Of The Materia Medica Used In Fray Agustin Farfan's Tratado Breve De Medicina, Y De Todas Las Enfermedades

Abstract

This thesis seeks to address an important problem in the historiography of early Mexican medicine. The problem being that evidence from Agustín Farfán’s Tratado' Breve'de'Medicina suggests that medicine in the New World was decidedly European, and not nearly as porous as some historians have suggested previously. Farfán used some of the New World therapeutics available to him, but he was sure to back up any recommendations of them—evidence that his readership (which was most likely European) had particular concerns about using New World therapeutics over familiar Old World elements—with assurances that he had used each before with great therapeutic success. There are hints, too, of a divide between practitioners—between those “with science” and those without—which had equally important implications for establishing practitioner hegemony. In the representations of and discourse around pain in his work, Farfán painted an intriguing portrait of sixteenthQcentury Europeans’ conceptions of pain. As opposed to our own modern conception of it, in its humoral pathology, pain was a byQproduct of bodily imbalance. As a result, bleedings and purgings—uncomfortable, and even painful, procedures themselves—were needed to help restore balance to the body. In this way, it meant that a practitioner had to hurt the patient in some way to set them along the path back to good health. Lastly, Farfán showed the effects of biocolonialism on the sixteenthQcentury therapeutic landscape. Europeans sought to create a new Europe in the New World, and from some of the earliest voyages colonists brought with them the plants to make that possible. From Columbus to Cortés and beyond, colonists introduced a bounty o