The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández, and: Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández (review)

Simon Varey, ed. The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández.Translated by Rafael Chabrán, Cynthia L. Chamberlin, and Simon Varey. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. xix + 281 pp. Ill. $65.00 (0-8047-3963-3).

Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora B. Weiner, eds. Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr. Francisco Hernández. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. xvi + 229 pp. Ill. $60.00 (0-8047-3964-1).

In 1570 King Philip II sent Francisco Hernández to Mexico as the crown's chief medical officer in the New World. His duties, as spelled out in the king's letter, were to gather information about the "natural things" he found in Spain's largely unknown new empire, and to consult local "doctors, medicine men, herbalists, Indians" (MT, p. 46) about the New World's herbs, trees, and medicinal plants, testing their alleged properties himself whenever possible. Finally, he should also write down their descriptions and discuss their "nature, virtue and temperament" (MT, p. 46).

Although his original commission ordered him to study the natural and medical worlds of both Peru and Mexico—or New Spain, as it was known in those early days—over the course of his eight-year stay he never managed to make it out of the high mountain valley that enclosed Mexico City. Its rich subtropical climate offered no shortage of things to study. In the surrounding countryside he discovered thousands of new species of plants and animals unknown to Europe. The city itself, as large as any in Europe of the day, offered a wealth of native informants: doctors and herbalists, as well thriving markets with thousands of buyers and sellers trading medicinal plants and materials gathered from across the region—all part of a native medical tradition that reached back hundreds of years.

Hernández gathered all this new information together in his massive Quatro libros de naturaleza, describing more than three thousand new plants and providing hundreds of illustrations commissioned from native artists in Mexico. His phenomenal output flooded botanists and natural historians in Europe with new material—most, at the time, had considered the 300- to 500-odd species described by classical authorities like Theophrastus and Dioscorides to be comprehensive. This work, together with Hernández's Antiquities of New Spain, which addressed the history and customs of the region's native peoples, would earn him the title of the world's Third Pliny.

No less revolutionary than the volume of Hernández's work was the mix of traditional and native views it contained. As a classically trained European physician of his day, he typically evaluated the properties of the plants and native medical treatments he described in terms of the prevailing humoral theory: they were hot or cold, and wet or dry. When it came to natural history and the task of classifying things, however, he typically used native terms, even when European words and categories were readily available. The natives' Náhuatl, he said, was precise and deep, even though they wrote it with glyphs like the Egyptians. More precise than Greek, it was so laden with meaning that the name alone was "enough to indicate the nature of any important thing" (MT, p. 78). To make sure his work was accessible he had it translated from its original Latin into not only Spanish, but Náhuatl as well.

Although the work was never published in Spain during Hernández's lifetime, it spread across Europe in a host of translations and excerpts. Reworked into English, Dutch, and Italian, it was regularly referred to by scholars and natural historians for nearly two centuries, studied by...