I am applying for a grant from the NIH-National Library of Medicine in order to """"""""buy out"""""""" my teaching for a semester so that I can devote my time entirely to research and writing in order to prepare a book manuscript for publication. The book is based on my dissertation, which traces the development of pharmacy in colonial Mexico from an early modern artisanal art to a modern health science. Based on archival documentation, it examines four areas of pharmacy in particular - pharmacy regulation, business practices, the preparation of medicines, and the cultural role of medicine in Mexican society - and shows how each underwent a fundamental transformation from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, through which pharmacy emerged as a modern, scientific discipline. The study is significant not only because it treats a little-known area of history of medicine, but also because it challenges traditional assumptions of Spain's 'backwardness"""""""" and lack of scientific innovation. In doing so, it ties Mexico and the Spanish Empire generally into a broader, transatlantic narrative of the Scientific Revolution and the development of western science and medicine. Thus this project aims to promote both deeper and broader knowledge of the history of science and medicine in societies outside Europe, and as such will be of value to historians of the health sciences.
This project will be of interest and value to historians of the health sciences because it treats a little-known area of history of medicine in the early modern period. Historians of early modern medicine generally study the work of physicians and, to a lesser extent, surgeons, and rarely discuss apothecaries. However, an understanding of the work of apothecaries, particularly the growing use of chemical medicine to supplement (and eventually supplant) the use of herbal preparations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is crucial in order to have a full grasp of the development of modern medicine and the growth of the pharmaceutical industry in the nineteenth century.
