Medicine at the Jesuit Missions of California

Abstract This article analyzes the development of transcultural medicinal practices and knowledge at the Jesuit missions of the California peninsula during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows how the province’s medical culture depended on— and expanded from—the one previously developed at the Jesuit missions of Sonora and Sinaloa, as well as from the medical culture of New Spain, which had already incorporated significant amounts of Mesoamerica’s medicinal arsenal into Europe’s medical botany. Jesuit medicine in northwest New Spain also incorporated medicines and remedies from Nahua, Mayo, Yaqui, Apache, Cora, Caribbean, and other Indigenous medicinal traditions. A first section describes the generally arid geography of the California peninsula and its great strategic value for the Spanish empire; it also provides a brief history of its early colonization, emphasizing Jesuit missionaries’ medicinal culture, mostly based on a close reading of Miguel Venegas’s Noticia de la California (Information on California; 1757). The second section analyzes the transcultural medicinal culture of the Jesuit missions of northwest New Spain, based on the Florilegio medicinal (Anthology of medicinal knowledge), a foundational collection of remedies written in the Jesuit college of Chihuahua by German-Moravian pharmacist Juan de Esteyneffer (1664–1716), and first printed in Mexico in 1712. The third and main section analyzes the medicinal culture of the California region, based on the 1798 natural history of missionary Miguel del Barco (1706–90), who worked many years as the leading medic in the mission of San Javier. Esteyneffer and Barco codified both Mexican and local remedies and medicines as empirically proven substitutes to their common Mediterranean counterparts, sometimes noting a perceived superior efficacy.