Critters of the Tianguis: Wet Markets at the Nexus of American–European Medicine

When the Spanish protomédico Dr. Francisco Hernández set out for Mexico in 1570, his task was to locate new medicines for the improvement of human health. The Mediterranean medical tradition with which he had become familiar during his university training was infused with a commitment to the healing powers of Dioscoridean materia medica, foregrounding how raw natural products could be combined to create therapies. While many scholars have focused on the rise of botany from that tradition, this paper concerns the intellectual and material presence of animal-derived medicines in the global drug trade.

Upon his arrival in the Americas, Dr. Hernández joined a cast of sixteenth-century physicians and naturalists eager to find cures in animal bodies. He sought out bezoars (stones thought to be powerful antidotes extracted from animal bellies), frogs, worms, fish, eggs, and insects, and other animal medicaments. On one hand, thinking about animal-based medicine brought him to natural history, recording the origins of these animals and details of their lives. But it was through the wet market – the tianguizco in Nahuatl – that he often encountered them, caged or freshly killed and ready for purchase.

Given the importance of animal medicaments to cures, what role did the wet market play in supplying medicaments during the first century of European-American entanglements? Today, wet markets provide access to medical ingredients for practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and have been studied epidemiologically as a site of disease exchange among nonhuman animal and human populations. This paper pushes the history of medicine beyond pharmacy, which has been heralded as a key space for understanding Mediterranean traditions of healing, perhaps emphasizing the use of herbal, plant-based medicine over the mixed animal-plant-mineral medicament palate employed in the early modern period.