Sessé y Lacasta, Martin de (1751-1808), Cervantes, Vicente de (1755-1829), and others

[Begins:] En todas las naciones civilizadas y en todos los tiempos de cultura se ha conocido la necesidad de promover los adelantamientos medicos [&c.].

Produced in Mexico.

In several hands.

This file copy of a corrected draft of a report to the Viceroy (probably drawn up at the original direction of Martín de Sessé as Director of the Botanical Expedition and continued by Cervantes after Sessé's return to Spain in 1803) recounts the Expedition's achievement in collecting, identifying, and making known more than 3,000 species.

The draft also recalls the extension of the Expedition's work (with Viceregal support) during 1800-04, with the opening of experimental wards in the Real Hospital de Indios and the Hospital General de San Andrés in the teeth of obstruction from the local medical establishment. Arguing that traditional humoral theories and practice were ill-founded and inefficacious, the report describes a graduated regimen and the use of tincture of opium (in various forms) in carefully graduated doses for treatment of the endemic complaints of diarrhoea, dysentery and diseases of the liver. Four typical cases from the ward journals for 1800 and 1801 are quoted in detail and the report concludes with a specimen extract from the regular monthly reports on patients treated in the experimental wards.

1802?-1804

18 ll 30 x 21 cm. Bound.

Purchased 1962.

Described in: Robin Price, An Annotated Catalogue of Medical Americana in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1983).

Formerly part of the Guerra Collection.