Abstract Recently uncovered documents from the Spanish 1779 ship Perla, traveling from Lima to Cádiz, reveal new perspectives on shipboard health conditions in the Pacific, and on their cures or treatments in the Spanish colonial context. An exchange of medical information took place through correspondence across the seas, including the smuggling of medicinal and botanical remedies. Eighteenth-century missionaries and doctors considered uses for and experiments with local cures and healing practices on both sides of the Pacific. Finally, I will study the case study of doctor Pedro de Vicuña, explaining his use of herbal remedies, such as the Pepita de Catbalogan, and describing how he concocted recipes against ailments important to Spanish colonial interests, such as scurvy, pulmonary disease, gastric illnesses, and infertility. Despite the confrontation with European medical principles, or a clash of medical cultures on religious grounds, we see a sustained eighteenth-century empirical and practical interest in “non-European” forms of medicine overseas.
Wim De Winter (Wed,) studied this question.