The Drugs That No One Wanted; or, Forgetting Indigenous Medicines

Only a small fraction of useful medicaments discovered by European researchers in the Americas during the colonial era ultimately passed into Atlantic pharmacopeias. This paper examines several of forgotten and obscured Indigenous cures, from psychedelics and alkaloids, to abortifacients and aphrodisiacs. It traces the lackluster reception of indigenous medicine in Europe through the efforts by the Galileo Galilei scientific society and the Accademia dei Lincei to edit and publish Dr. Hernández’s notes from the colossal Mexican Treasury. Through these examples, it argues that researchers of the time focused on distilling all of nature into useful tidbits, which made it hard for them to formulate useful conclusions, and which led to the loss of the cultural and social context of cures.