Contested medical knowledge and regional self-fashioning

Abstract

Chapter 4 analyses Juan de Cárdenas’s Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias in the context of the negative critiques it offered of two contemporaries who had written about New World medicine without leaving Spain: Nicolás Monardes and Oliva Sabuco. Cárdenas found fault with both Monardes's Historia medicinal (1565) and Sabuco's Nveva filosofia de la naturaleza del hombre (1587) identifying flaws in the cause-and-effect reasoning espoused by each source and providing examples that arrived at different results. But Cárdenas’s medical challenge, articulated on scientific principle, belied a growing unease about the marginal status conferred to locally published scholarly efforts in the larger global stage of scientific enquiry; Monardes was keenly interested in New World bezoars especially whereas Sabuco’s ideas on digestion rested on her observations of the quick effects of ingesting coca leaves from Peru. By adopting an oppositional model of refutation that anchored itself on a geographically and culturally determined group identity, Cárdenas’s writing began mounting a challenge to the unequal distribution of epistemological authority in transatlantic colonial hierarchies.