Medical practitioners in early colonial Mexico

This dissertation investigates medical practitioners in early colonial Mexico during the epidemics that decimated the aboriginal population. A collection of prosopographies of a mostly unknown group of medical practitioners within colonial Mexico's social-economic parameters is contextualized. Legal conflicts that involved physicians, surgeon-barbers, and pharmacists are employed to show the identities and the dynamics of their associations. Pharmacists as retailers and even financiers of the transatlantic botanical substances trade connected the medical practice to the capitalist economy and affected other practitioners through their drugs. In offering a full study of medical practice this is the first work to integrate an extensive collection of archival records from both sides of the Atlantic. It focuses on sets of relations over time to expose how the barber-physician dialectic defined the medical profession for over two centuries and determined medical practitioners' social position. Medical practitioners included a diverse group of people that occupied three social classes. Whereas official Spanish physicians and prosperous owner-pharmacists formed part of colonial society's elite, African herbalists, Indigenous physicians (ticitl in Nahuatl), wage pharmacists, and poor Spanish, Filipino and casta (mixed blood) surgeon-barbers occupied the lowest urban class. Between them existed Portuguese and French physicians, less affluent Spanish owner-pharmacists and prosperous Spanish surgeon-barbers. However heterogenous medical practitioners were, the contradictions between surgeon-barbers and physicians reveal diverging material conditions, daily activities, intellectual habits, and social behavior. Usually it was the most prosperous of the three classes that served as functionaries in colonial institutions such as the Inquisition. Most traveled the same routes to Mexico and followed similar procedures for professional accreditation before departure, but all went to the Americas to fulfill their economic needs in search of improved opportunities. This investigation considers who the medical practitioners were, where they originated, how long they had been in the Indies, where they resided in colonial Mexico, and their social circumstances. It speaks to the articulation debate by tracing owner-pharmacists' dual role as merchants and producers of pharmacy commodities in an urban setting. It also aims, albeit partially, to uncover the medical professions measured transformations through the dialectical relationship between the barber and the physician.