Recent historiography on the acquisition and accumulation of pharmaceutical knowledge by Europeans in the New World has emphasized the idea that researchers should be careful to describe exactly how knowledge was being transferred—in both intellectual and material terms—, especially if one aims to understand how science traveled and was translated between different cultures and languages from Europe and its American colonies.
In this case study, three men, namely, the Brazilian botanist José Mariano da Conceição Veloso (1741-1811), the French explorer Charles Marie de la Condamine (1701-74), and the English naturalist John Hawkins (1761-1841), and three species of plant will be discussed. The plants are, according to current nomenclature, Myroxylon balsamum, Cinchona officinalis and Baccharis trimera.
In 1735 during his expedition to Peru, la Condamine located and acquired several young plants from the region where the species from which Jesuit’s bark was extracted had been originally found, and sent them to scientific societies in Europe. More than half a century later, John Hawkins found one of those samples, kept in the Royal Society, and published an article in which he identified the species as Myroxylon balsamum.
Right after that, in Lisbon, while preparing a monograph about different species of quinas which could be found in South America, Veloso read Hawkins’ botanical description and, disagreeing with the attribution he had made, reassigned it to the species currently known as Baccharis trimera, a plant also native to Peru and the Central South regions of Brazil.
This case study shows an example of the flow of scientific information between Europe and America during the late Enlightenment period, when knowledge about the medicinal plant Baccharis trimera, native of South America, travelled twice across the Atlantic. First the knowledge crossed the Atlantic eastward in the form of a botanical specimen collected in Spanish America, during a French-led expedition, and reached an English botanist, who had it published in the journal from a learned London society. Then the botanical information about the plant made the return trip to South America in the form of a description together with two plates published in a book printed in Lisbon by a Brazilian botanist, whose purpose was to disseminate utilitarian information to the colonials settled in Brazil.