| This study traces the development of pharmaceutical practice in New Spain over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pharmacy was part of the western medical establishment put in place by Spanish bureaucrats early on in the process of Spanish settlement of the New World. At the time, pharmacy was considered an art in that it required a good deal of artisanal skill on the part of the boticarios and little formal education. By the early nineteenth century, however, pharmacy had transformed into a science, in that it had undergone processes of specialization and professionalization. Pharmacy required increased understanding of theoretical scientific concepts as well as its own regulatory institutions.; The ideas and practices of early pharmacy reflected traditional medical theory, cosmology, concepts of social and religious hierarchy and methods of colonial rule. Boticarios were trained in Hippocratic medicine and understood medicines to work according to the “virtues” they contained. A centralized medical board appointed by the Spanish king oversaw the examination and licensing of pharmacists as well as periodic inspections of pharmacies. Pharmacists had to have “pure” Spanish blood and insured good business by maintaining reputations as pious and charitable practitioners.; Parcelsian medicine and the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century brought a “pharmacy revolution” which explained medicines and virtues in chemical terms. This revolution was accompanied by a “medicalization” of hospitals in the early eighteenth century, in which in-house pharmacies became a regular component of those institutions. Enlightenment ideals coupled with greater state intervention in matters of social welfare and public health further promoted the increasingly contractual nature of ties between medical practitioner and patient. The gradual erosion of the pharmacists' need to provide evidence of piety resulted in a generalized crisis in medicine in the late eighteenth century, where practitioners and patients alike called for reform of outdated and inefficient regulations. Pharmacists now needed significant training in botany and chemistry, and in 1780 began to call for the establishment of a specialized “Proto-farmacéutico” to govern the profession. In an intellectual, institutional, and practical sense, therefore, pharmacy had become a science. |
