Francisco Hernandez

by

Francisco Hernández in New Spain

‘Doctor Francisco Hernández declares: that he had resided by order of Your Majesty for nearly eight years in New Spain, during which time he has caused the natural things of this land to be depicted and described better and more accurately than had previously been possible…’

Francisco Hernández’s letter to King Philip II of Spain.*

Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651),

second title page.

Francisco Hernández’s Nova plantarum, printed at Rome in 1651, has two title pages. This image of the second title page makes clear the vital role of the Spanish crown in both the genesis and publication of the work. Hernández (1515-87) was a Spanish physician, who had been sent to Mexico by Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) and the resulting work was published under the auspices of his grandson, Philip IV of Spain (1605-1665) – hence the royal coat of arms at  the top of the page. The project was viewed by Philip II as an important part of Spain’s colonizing strategy. Of particular interest to the king were the medicinal benefits which might accrue to the crown. The search for plants which had a medicinal value had been given an added impetus with the rise of new diseases in the sixteenth century, such as syphilis – and this, in turn led to an interest in books about plants and animals in the New World. Philip II makes this motivation very clear in the instructions he gave to Hernández before he set out:

‘First, that with the first fleet to leave these realms for New Spain you shall embark and shall go first to that land and to no other of the said Indies because we are informed that more plants, herbs, and medicinal seeds are to be found these than elsewhere.

Item, you shall consult, wheresoever you go, all the doctors, medicine men, herbalists, Indians, and other persons with knowledge in such matters, if it seems to you that they have understanding and knowledge and thus you shall gather information generally about herbs, trees, and medicinal plants in whichever province you are at the time.

Further, you are to find out how the abovementioned things are applied, what are their uses in practice, their powers, an in what quantities the said medicines are given, as well as the places in which they grow and their method of cultivation, and whether their habitat be dry or moist, or if they grow near other trees and plants, and if they occur in different varieties, and you shall write down descriptions thereof.’**

Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651),

first title page.

Of Hernández himself we know relatively little: Having studied medicine at the University of Alcala, he had worked as a doctor in La Puebla de Montalban, the monastery of Guadalupe and the Hospital of Santa Cruz in Toledo, before being appointed a royal doctor in 1567 and chief medical officer in the Indies in 1570. In Mexico Hernández had a dual mandate: he was there as protomédico (public health officer) and as a scientific researcher. As the former he became involved in treatments for patients during an outbreak of ‘cocoliztli’, an epidemic which ran through the population, but, due to political difficulties, Hernández in the main devoted the first few years of his sojourn to compiling his natural history, rather than solely focusing on medical matters. Hernández’s work therefore went beyond the royal mandate in not being solely concerned with therapeutic uses.

The publication of such a work was a huge undertaking and despite official backing took a long time to come to fruition. As the listing of names on the first title page makes clear, the final abridged version was published due to the cooperation of a team of editors and correspondents who sought to substantiate Hernández’s observations. In this sense it is a multi-authored work, with substantial work being done by Nardo Antonio Recchi in the 1580s, and in the first decades of the seventeenth century by members of the famous Academy of the Lynxes – such as Johannes Faber. This was not unusual – much work on natural history at this period was the result of scientists corresponding with each other, sharing their observations and publishing them in various scientific journals. This was necessary because not all commentators had had Hernández’s opportunity to travel to the New World. As Freedberg (2002) relates, Johannes Faber, the secretary of the Academia dei Lincei, contributed chapters on Mexican animals – despite never having travelled to Mexico. He was therefore forced to rely on other authorities, including first-hand accounts from the Spanish Franciscan Gregorio Bolivar, who had lived for 25 years in South America and who was a reliable witness.

Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651), p. 31 Dahlia.

As we can see in this image of a Dahlia, the national flower of Mexico, Hernández gave plants their Nahuatl names. Nomenclature was a real problem for him as most of these plants had no known equivalents in Europe. As Varey (2000) notes, the format of most chapters was similar: Hernández would first describe the appearance of the herb, and would then describe its fruit, color, shape, size and smell in that order. After that came a section of its varieties, its medicinal value, the climate and terrain necessary for its development and whether it could be grown in Spain. This taxonomy may well have been based on Amerindian formulations – it was subsequently discarded by Recchi in favour of a Theophrastan categorization of trees, shrubs and herbs. Hernández’s description is the earliest known description of a dahlia.

Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651), p. 299 De Cacamotic Tlanoquiloni seu Batata purgativa.

Here we see a depiction of ‘Cacamotic Tlanoquiloni’ which is a member of the Ipomoea genus in the flowering plant family Convolvulaceae. While Von Humboldt (1822) identified it with Ipomoea purga (Convolvulaceae), Wiener (1920) considered it to be a ‘purgative yam’ which has often been confused with Ipomoea batata (Convolvulaceae), the sweet potato. As Wiener relates, terminological difficulties were present when it was first named for the ‘cacamotic’ of the title was not an original Nahuatl word but derived from the Philippine word ‘camote’, which had been introduced into the region by Spanish colonists. ‘Camote’ refers to the something soft and bland – just like sweet potatotoes. At the end of the picture we can see how Hernández’s seventeenth-century editors sought to draw connections with the descriptions of pototoes in texts by other early modern botanists such as Monardes (whose works were not collected by Worth) and Clusius (whose works were). Hernández’s own text would later be cited by late seventeenth-century luminaries such as Robert Morison, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and John Ray, who, as López Piñero  et al (2000) point out, included whole chunks of Hernández’s text. The reason for this was obvious, Hernández’s book was and continued to be the most important botanical work on Mexican botany for many years to come.

Francisco Hernández, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium Mexicanorum historia (Rome, 1651), p. 880 Flos Cardinalis Barberini.

* Quotation cited in Varey, Simon (2000), ‘Francisco Hernández, Renaissance Man’ in Searching for the Secrets of Natue. The Life and Works of Dr Francisco Hernández, edited by Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora B. Weiner, (Stanford University Press), p. 39.

** Quotation cited in ibid., p. 35.

Sources

Freedberg, David (2002), The Eye of the Lynx. Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Natural History (University of Chicago Press).

López Piñero, José M. and Pardo Tomás, José (2000), ‘The Contribution of Hernández to European Botany and Materia Medica’ in Searching for the Secrets of Natue. The Life and Works of Dr Francisco Hernández, edited by Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora B. Weiner, (Stanford University Press), pp. 122-137.

Von Humboldt, Alexander and Black, John (1822) Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (London), vol II, p. 455.

Varey, Simon (2000), ‘Francisco Hernández, Renaissance Man’ in Searching for the Secrets of Natue. The Life and Works of Dr Francisco Hernández, edited by Simon Varey, Rafael Chabrán, and Dora B. Weiner, (Stanford University Press), pp.33-40.

Varey, Simon, Chabrán, Rafael and Weiner, Dora B. (2000), Searching for the Secrets of Natue. The Life and Works of Dr Francisco Hernández (Stanford University Press).

Wiener, Leo (1920), Africa and the Discovery of America (Philadelphia).

by