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

In 1570, King Philip II appointed Francisco Hernández (1515–1587) as protomédico of New Spain and ordered him to conduct research on the natural history, materia medica, and ethnography of this newly colonized land. Philip instructed Hernández to compile his findings into a collection akin to Pliny's Natural History (which the royal doctor was in the process of translating into Spanish) and then to travel to Peru, where he was to undertake the same pattern of investigations. Seven years later, without having visited Peru, Hernández returned to Spain, having finished his translation of Pliny, penned Antiquities of New Spain and Natural History of New Spain, collected countless botanical samples, and prepared manuscripts on various ethnographic topics. Unfortunately, his sympathy toward Mexican culture, his antagonistic relationship with officials in New Spain, and his suspected converso background led to a less than triumphant welcome. Despite having completed a project that rivaled the labors of Father Bernandino de Sahagún, Hernández's works were poorly received in the royal court and would suffer relative ignominy outside of Spain in the years to come. This fine two-volume set seeks to partially redress these shortcomings.

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies sponsored this research project as part of its effort to "commemorate the arrival of Columbus in America" (Searching, ix). The two volumes, while they can be used separately, were conceived as a complementary collection of writings and their interpretive contextualization. The Mexican Treasury contains an impressive collection of writings by Hernández, including Quatro Libros de la Naturaleza (1615), a listing of scores of plants and the illnesses that they alleviate, and Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (1651), including many of the illustrations from this widely circulated text. (A CD-ROM or Web site to obtain electronic images of these illustrations is sorely missed.) King Philip's original instructions, Hernández's letters to the king, several ethnographic writings, and samples from the works of botanists from the Low Countries, England, and Spain who used Hernández's findings are included as well. Two introductory essays trace the history of the Hernández texts and the Natural History of New Spain, making The Mexican Treasury an essential compilation for the study of the "father of Spanish science." The companion volume, Searching for the Secrets of Nature, includes essays by sixteen authors that place the protomédico within the intellectual and medical worlds of sixteenth-century Spain, explores the dissemination of knowledge created by Hernández within Europe, and offers brief but suggestive essays on the "continuing traditions of Mexican medicine" (vi).

The Mexican Treasury succeeds admirably in its primary objective of bringing together the protomédico's substantial written corpus, although its ethnographic blinders might trouble many scholars. The project directors searched archives throughout Europe and the Americas to locate copies of Hernández's work and to filter his original perspective from texts produced by later authors. The essays by Rafael Chabrán, Simon Varey, and Jesús Bustamante are models of archival analysis. The texts are presented with brief, unobtrusive introductions, thereby allowing the reader a largely transparent version of his writings. However, although Hernández's writings parallel those of Sahagún as sources of Spanish perceptions of Mexican culture, we are seldom offered insights into the relationship between indigenous informants and Hernández (save perhaps in...