Pérez Marín, Yarí (Author)
This dissertation offers a study of four texts on materia medica written during the second half of the sixteenth century, a time in which New Spain, its nature and peoples took center stage. It examines the ways in which political, literary and scientific discourses operated in tandem, engaging in processes that both appropriated and reconfigured classical notions on medicine and natural history to argue for or against New World difference. Even as wonder continued to be at the core of many arguments, unlike the accounts of Columbus or Fernández de Oviedo, these later texts engaged the marvelous only as they attempted to supersede it. Natural products were emptied of their indigenous "excess" as part of a creole project that sought to portray America as a viable and apprehensible extension of the Spanish Empire. All Spanish-born, the authors I examine occupy different positions in the medical hierarchy, from surgeons and anatomists to university-trained doctors and professors: Nicolás Monardes (1512-1597), Pedro Arias de Benavides (b. 1521), Agustín Farfán (1532-1604) and Juan de Cárdenas (1563-1609). Monardes became an authority on New World nature for European audiences, despite never having crossed the Atlantic. Benavides traveled widely throughout Central America and the Caribbean before returning to Spain, yet his work remained largely unknown. Farfán and Cárdenas not only settled in New Spain, but also became part of colonial society and the medical establishment. Rather than organizing a comprehensive historiography of medicine as a practice in Mexico, I engage these works in a different poetics, moving from an historical grounding into literary analysis. Taking into account the relevance of medicine as a subject for New World readers, ranking top in book purchases among the sciences, and considering that many of the now cornerstone texts in colonial literature were not (explicitly) works of fiction, my analysis brings to the fore other kinds of equally imaginative textual production. By tracing both the scientific underpinnings and the literary models of late sixteenth-century notions on nature, social taxonomies and gender roles, I make a case for the incorporation of writings on medicine into current discussions on colonial historiography and literature.
...MoreDescription Focus on four texts by Nicolás Monardes (1512-1597), Pedro Arias de Benavides (b. 1521), Agustín Farfán (1532-1604), and Juan de Cárdenas (1563-1609). Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/08 (2007). UMI pub. no. 3227910.
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