Compound Remedies invites readers into the pharmacy of Jacinto de Herrera y Campos in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. The apothecary's medicines, equipment, and records provide a glimpse into early modern medical practice. Paula De Vos asks how Galenic medicine transformed and changed before arriving in New Spain, and how it evolved in the Americas with exposure to new environments and materia medica. In answering these questions, she challenges long-held assumptions that Latin American apothecaries tell us more about colonial than European medicine. In doing so, she embraces the global turn in the history of science. De Vos contends that the history of colonial Mexican pharmacies must include key learning centers in the Mediterranean world and beyond like Córdoba, Santander, Alexandria, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Montpellier, Florence, Paris, and London (p. 15).
This rich history traverses centuries of knowledge through the libraries and writings of several Mediterranean intellectuals, including Galen, Dioscorides, Paul...
