The Payment Cure

Prescription Slips and a Widow’s Debt

Even today, a pharmacist might preserve filled prescriptions on the counter, stabbing the slips of paper through a peg. In doing so, they are participating in a tradition of recordkeeping that dates back to the early modern period. In Valladolid, 500 years after the scripts were written, a total of 213 slips of meticulously preserved prescriptions fulfilled by apothecary, or boticario Francisco de Madrid remain.¹ As a record of maladies, diagnoses, treatment, and cost, these slips are tethered by string to a trial record documenting the collection of money from unpaid bills for medicaments (Figure 1).² Much like in a Spanish farmacia today, each prescription was a receipt of an order and a reminder that the transfer of each medicament was a transaction in the business of healing. By holding on to the prescription, the apothecary preserved a record of the remedies he had concocted, the intended patient, and a promise of a payment unfulfilled.³ This paper slip archive became what historians Mauricio Herrero Jiménez and Luis Tamayo Lomas define as one family’s personal recipe book of medicaments while constituting a record of the debts owed to the medicines’ makers.⁴

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Figure 1.

Starting with one for Xarabe Violado, Francisco de Madrid’s prescriptions interwoven by string, “Pleito Litigado por Maria de Ayala,” 1558, ES.47186.ARCHV//PL CIVILES, Alonso Rodriguez (F), caja 889, 3.

In his thriving practice from 1545 to 1576, Madrid supplied customers with medicaments, which they vowed to pay for at a later date. Well-connected and reliable, he administered medicines to the Hospital de Santa María de Esgueva de Valladolid and many members of the court.⁵ Although the hospital fully repaid its debt—which totaled 300,000 maravedís in 1569—when Madrid died, others were left unpaid. One of his major customers, a chancellor of the University of Valladolid and magistrate of the Valladolid court, Félix de Manzanedo (1500–1576), had relied on Madrid’s inventory for many of his family’s remedies.⁶ By 1529, Felix de Manzanedo was the recorded chair of the department of “Instituta moderna” of the University of Valladolid, a program that taught judicial law and civil rights.⁷ Between 1535 and 1537, Manzanedo served as chancellor of the University of Valladolid, a position that granted him and his family access to the best physicians and apothecary shops. Historian Anastasio Rojo Vega finds unspoken agreement like the one between Madrid and Manzanedo to be part of a culture of “elite medicine,” in which “notable doctors” provide cures for the “elite sick.”⁸

The dispersion of medical requests was greater than a direct connection of physicians to patients, however, as elite patients could sign off on these requests themselves. Although Manzanedo was no physician, his name, alongside notable physicians Juan de Peñarada and Pedro Enrique, is mentioned in a number of prescriptions, with some recipes signed off or credited to the physician in question.⁹ In Manzanedo’s world, prescriptions were not as official as they are today, where only a doctor (or in some regions a nurse practitioner or a physician’s assistant) may sign off on a request for a controlled substance. Instead, the slips of paper are bolstered by the academic reputation of their requesters, who were part of a wider network that could enlist help for their health directly from the apothecary.¹⁰ Consider a prescription for one ounce of sweet almond oil (Figure 2), where after a brief request for the medicine, the Manzanedo patriarch signed the prescription as “Doctor Manzanedo.” While not significant, as many of the Manzanedo’s recipes handed to Madrid were confirmed by the patriarch or his wife, the signature introduces and subsequently involves the patient in the business of healing. Alongside the physician and the apothecary owner is the individual requesting the medicine, thus blurring further the boundaries of what constitutes the formal authority of a medical transaction—a concern that becomes central in the Ayala v. Manzanedo case.

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Figure 2.

This is a prescription slip for one ounce of sweet almond oil (aceite de almendras dulces), signed by “El Doctor Manzanedo.” “Pleito Litigado por Maria de Ayala,” 1558, ES.47186.ARCHV//PL CIVILES, Alonso Rodriguez (F), caja 889, 3. Prescription 152.

When Manzanedo, the magistrate, and Madrid, the apothecary, died in quick succession, their heirs were left to settle their debts. Throughout the region of Valladolid, apothecaries and their families could reliably turn to the courts to reclaim what they were owed for making medicines, both for elite patients and the merchant class. Often a hearing was used to establish and collect the value of medicaments. For example, a 1564 court case documents the debt between Vicente Martín Méndez and apothecary owner García de Salas in Medina de Campo, a city near Valladolid. After failing to pay for his treatment, Salas took to court to settle Méndez’s debt for the total of 2,840 maravedís accrued over a year, between September 6, 1562, and January 17, 1564.¹¹ Like the Maria de Ayala case, the apothecary shop was right to demand the payment of medicaments, and the patient was expected to pay the price in this transaction of healing.¹² As Paula De Vos finds, this “business of healing” continued to exist even in New Spain. Debts accumulated on behalf of the apothecary shop continued to occur in shops in Spanish Mexico in the nineteenth century.¹³ As it appears, debts became symbolic to an apothecary’s success because they demonstrated to the community their reliability and reputation.

A decade later, when her husband died, widow Maria de Ayala was left in a bit of a pickle. Manzanedo was a significant debtor from a prosperous family, but it was unusual for a family to fail to settle up the deceased’s business, especially given his standing in the community. As others of her husband’s profession had, and common for widows of apothecary owners, Ayala turned to the courts in an effort to collect the money owed to her. While payments to widows were not always monetary, often they were allowed to settle the debts left by their husband.¹⁴ Francisco de Madrid appears to have had many elite clients, with equally elite debts to settle, as the notary makes note of seven additional families, including the family of an inquisidor reliego.¹⁵ In the opening pages of the trial, the total accumalated debt was documented as an astonishing total of 148,507 maravedís, an amount that Herrero Jiménez and Tamayo Lomas describe as four times the salary of a sixteenth-century professor of medicine at the University of Alcalá.¹⁶ Seeking to collect a portion of this debt, Ayala pursued legal action against the heirs and children of the Manzanedo family. In 1577, she sued for a debt of 15,717 maravedís, a debt incurred over the course of thirteen years, between 1555 and 1571.¹⁷ But this total was not the one paid as the trial concluded; instead, this case is an example of how an apothecary becomes part of a wider regional discussion on medicine and prices. The authority of the apothecary shop owner and his widowed wife was contested in this legal battle for the payment cure.

Ayala and her lawyer, Balthasar Nuñez, arrived at the highest courts in Valladolid with 213 prescriptions as evidence of the accrued debt collected by the Manzanedo family.¹⁸ Part of the court’s challenge became establishing a link between the medicines requested, their value, and the amount expected by the apothecary’s family. Just as researchers into historical pharmacopeias today struggle to link physical objects, their bodily effects, their names, amounts, and costs, so did these early modern apothecaries, lawyers, notaries, and physicians have to agree on the connections among these various types of information and come to a tidy sum. The remaining trial records show how lawyers and notaries used prescription slips to create an inventory of medicines and their associated monetary value; Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) understands the resulting document to be a functional pharmacopeia. The prescription slips are not the pharmacopeia yet. But the slips become a pharmacopeia in the eyes of the HP project when they are aggregated in a list form. “Functional pharmacopeia” is a technical term that is used to find comparisons across documents like this one. Because both the prescription slips and the court-produced inventory of materia medica survive in the legal records, this episode provides evidence for the creation of non-normative lists of medicaments and the allocation of value to these remedies. In short, the functional pharmacopeias associated with the Ayala v. Manzanedo trial revealed a negotiation among experts in law, medicine, and materia medica over the amount of debt that the Manzanedo family owed to Ayala.

In the end, Ayala did not end up receiving her initial request of 15,717 maravedís from the Manzanedo family. Instead, in 1578, in an updated total tallied by a friar from San Pablo de Valladolid, Juan Ruiz de Santillana, who was in charge of his monastery’s botica, concluded that the Manzanedos only owed 11,800 maravedís.¹⁹ In a statement confirming the total, notary Pedro de Aranda details that the highest court of Valladolid contested the total Ayala presented originally to confirm the amount owed by the Manzanedos. Aranda wrote in the official court statement that from the total of 15,717 maravedís, the friar believed it was best to reduce the amount by 3,916—perhaps a deliberate miscalculation to have a final even sum.²⁰ The friar only appears in the statements confirming the total and was consulted only after the creation of the list of medicaments—the total amount tallied by the notaries on the final page of the inventory was written as 15,717. By November 14, 1578, Aranda testified and concluded the trial by approving the new total. Later in December, Ayala requested the high court of Valladolid to execute the verdict, putting an end to the dispute.²¹

These legal events raise as many questions as they answer. What at first looks like a clear process of preserving a record of expenses instead turns out to be more complicated. It was not enough for Ayala to simply provide the prescription slips. The final value of the medicaments came not from the total that could be calculated from those documents but from the values determined by yet another expert in materia medica, the botica Santillana from the nearby monastery. This raises questions as to how apothecaries, courts, patients, and medicaments can converge to become a regional pharmacopeia. How did Madrid run his business if he wasn’t collecting payments owed to him? Was this a common system in Spanish pharmacies? Most important for the HP project writ large: What is the function of a functional pharmacopeia if the main goal is establishing monetary value?

From Stringed Prescriptions to a Functional Pharmacopeia

In the eyes of the court—and perhaps to Ayala herself—what ultimately mattered was the payout from the restitution. The many pages of documents culminated in a single sum, the aggregate of what she was owed. All of the details included in the receipts and functional pharmacopeia served as proof of the veracity of her claims. Each compound medicine was listed to be valued, measured, and summed. For modern researchers interested in Spanish apothecaries and recipes, keen to understand medicine as material culture, the archives of the Real Chancillería of Valladolid provide a window into sixteenth-century health and its value. This extensive legal archive is filled with documents recording apothecaries collecting debts, apothecaries in debt, apothecary shops sold, and sometimes even poisonings prescribed by daughters of apothecary shop owners.²² While the simple outcome of justice was of the highest import to those who lived through it, the extensive proof-making efforts construct a language of and protocol for good health in the Iberian world. By reading back through the work that went into this functional pharmacopeia and its careful preservation of details, its courtly function as establishing financial value starts to melt away. Instead, the function of the functional pharmacopeia rests in the details: the dynamic recognition of all of the requests, simples, and labor required to deliver compound medicines to a family and treat their ailments.

By transcribing the Ayala functional pharmacopeia on the Instrument for Documentary Analysis created by members of the DALME (and discussed in the Visual Pharmacy section of this special issue), we sought to read this document in the context of other premodern functional pharmacopeias. Looking beyond the context of Ayala’s trial and the sum of the medicaments’ value determined by the courts, what emerges is an apothecary shop that specialized in floral and other herbal distillations. In particular, the prevalence of rose-based cures suggests the popularity of this medicament, one that corresponds with the roses’ long history as a medical ingredient in medieval and early modern medical books across Europe. By looking into one common remedy, one can see how this functional pharmacopeia parallels a number of reference pharmacopeias. The rose is a ubiquitous medicament, and we can use it to understand and follow its resonance across pharmacopeias. I look for answers to the following questions: Did Madrid’s remedies match up with the published pharmacopeia tradition that was increasingly popular in Spain at the time? What were the values of different medicaments? Who had the authority to determine these values, and how variable were such determinations?

As mentioned in other contributions in this special issue, the HP project relies on an ontology that separates pharmacopeias into two types—reference and functional—defining the bounds of some of our research questions and objectives. Reference pharmacopeias could be manuscript or printed. Like the oft-cited Ricettario Fiorentino, they present an idealized or normative set of medicaments, such as those that a practitioner should or could have on hand.²³

In contrast, functional pharmacopeias, including postmortem apothecary inventories, describe existing stores or collections. In functional pharmacopeias, we can see what people actually had on hand. In Ayala’s case, the function came by linking medicaments to cost of fulfillment and establishing that as her debt. However, similar lists linking materia medica or compound medicine, amount, and cost run the gamut of functional needs. Some are shipping or shopping lists, including what a military operation might need; by the nineteenth century, the answer is often more leeches.²⁴ Functional pharmacopeias are usually not written with the intention of serving as a medical or scientific authority. Each offers a snapshot into a living collection, often preserved in a moment of transfer from one owner to the next. Ridden with idiosyncrasies and carrying information about a particular apothecary shop at a specific moment in time, functional pharmacopeias thus reflect humanity and personality in what might, at first glance, appear to be a trivially compiled list of medicines. Rather than presuming the correct practice for others, creators of functional pharmacopeias noted what worked for apothecaries, physicians, and patients in distinct areas. As others in this issue have suggested, comparing them can reveal localisms and contexts that differed considerably and other ways practices sought to take part in a universal mission.

We read these types of sources as exemplifying what Alisha Rankin has called an “archive of practice”—“a set of original sources based in practices rather than texts.”²⁵ Instead of an authoritative presumption about what substances had abstract healing properties, they react to what has been thought to work in the past. Ayala’s suit against the Manzanedo family produced a functional pharmacopeia from the prescriptions issued over a decade of business. Organized into a single list with associated values and a total of debts accrued, this is a lively “archive of practice,” representing the preferred remedies of a physician’s family, complete with medicaments commonly prescribed for chronic or recurring maladies. Madrid’s filled prescriptions do not reflect the normative priorities about what medicine ought to be prescribed. Instead, they showcase a family’s confidence in tried-and-true remedies for the illnesses that resurfaced time and again.

The prescription receipts as an archive of practice represents the medicaments the Manzanedo family trusted and relied on. While Herrero Jiménez and Tamayo Lomas used the prescriptions to analyze these medicaments through data and charts, the HP project looks to question the authorities who created the inventory in the first place. One discrepancy in using the prescriptions instead of the inventory is in the order assigned by the archives. Although the slip labeled as “1” is at the top of the pile of slips, the prescription is transcribed in the notarial inventory near the very end. Among other differences, the aggregated inventory stands true to what information was most useful to the apothecary, unlike the prescription slips, which attest to the family and their relationship with medicine and healing. What becomes a functional pharmacopeia is the culmination of the many partakers in the business of healing.

These prescriptions slips are scrawled in different papers, hands, and with varying degrees of legibility. The top slip looks like many others, prescribing “a violate xarabe” a syrup from the Andalusian Arabic (see Figure 1). This was for the wife of a Dr. Manzanedo, signed by himself on March 19, 1558.²⁶ His wife, Doña Ana de Manzanedo, often signed on the physician’s behalf. The slips featured different compound remedies, in most cases. One prescribes two ounces of aparicio oil,²⁷ and another clarifies that the remedy would be useful for a “sick little girl.”²⁸ Others offered cassie electuary, various unguents, or water made from an ox’s tongue herb or myrobalan plums.²⁹ Often the slips included more than just the details of the medicament, but who needed them and why: the sickness of “the youngest,” the ailment of “the child.”³⁰ Others feature reasons for the particular unguent or syrup.³¹

HP’s methodology prioritizes the logic of lists—what is included and excluded, inherent order, uniqueness with language and overlaps. As a result, our interest centers on what happened when the individual receipts were transformed by a notary into a single, unified document. Madrid’s prescriptions, and the functional pharmacopeia developed from them over the trial, served as far more than a mere inventory of a shop’s contents. It carried an argument about the value of the shop and exemplified how historical actors used the form of pharmacopeia as a means for developing legal arguments and negotiating the terms of debt repayment. In the remaining trial records, we find the first list on folio 34r (Figure 3). It begins with a brief description of inventory as an “account of medicines given for the service and household of doctor Manzanedo.”³² To the left of the title, written in a hurried hand, a short note reads “account of Manzanedos sum, 15,717 [maravedís]” as reminder to the notary and the court of the issue at hand.³³ Indeed, the notary most likely added the total sum of the inventory last so that anyone reading the case could easily access the trial details and demonstrating how the total provided by Ayala continued to be used as an assumed sum, which later was contested by the friar. Through transcription, the notary interwove language from the rest of the trial proceedings, including the title of “Doctor” for Manzanedo.³⁴ At the end of the inventory transcribed by the notary, an index lists the total price of medicaments on each inventory pages. The first line reads: “account of six pages and in each one there are the following parts.”³⁵ The index, conforming to the form of a wider range of functional and reference pharmacopeias, reveals an effort to render the information in the inventory accessible and legible to a wider audience outside of the confines of an apothecary shop.³⁶

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Figure 3.

Starting with “Quenta de las medicinas que se llebaron para el serbicio y casa del Señor Doctor Manzanedo.” First page of account detailing the debt owed to Maria de Ayala, “Pleito Litigado por Maria de Ayala,” 1558, ES.47186.ARCHV//PL CIVILES, Alonso Rodriguez (F), caja 889, 3, folio 34r.

Reading across and down the page, the standardized form of the functional pharmacopeia is immediately apparent. Beginning each line with ytem, the transcriptions only include an abbreviated version of Madrid’s original prescription archive. Next, one finds the unit of measure for the medicament. Finally, the line concludes with a price, which is then tallied at the end of the list. For example, the list starts with a prescription for olei cappary (caper oil) and sery borry (borage syrup) and ends with its price of thirty-four maravedís written on the right margin, most likely given to the notary afterward, evidenced by the change in hand and color of the ink.³⁷ Unlike the prescriptions, which use common names for the medicaments—caper oil is exactly that, aceite de alcaparras, and borage syrup is annotated as jarave de borrajas—the inventory does not use Spanish in the transcription the same way it is used in the prescription.³⁸ For example, on the fourth line of the first page, the notary writes two rose medicaments in Latin as olei rosati, followed by aceti rosary, implying a change in the apothecary’s preparation of the substance.³⁹ In this case, while olei rosati, translating to “rose oil,” was part of the prescription slips, physicians preferred other ways to describe the medicament, like aceite rosarum or azeite rrosado, implying a need to differentiate from the Castilian word for oil, aceite, and azeite.⁴⁰ Aceti rosado does not show up on the prescription notes because the physicians and Madrid preferred to use the Spanish word for vinegar, vinagre.⁴¹ By translating the medicaments from Spanish to Latin (not uncharacteristic of official documents), the notary standardizes the functional pharmacopeia, transforming a list of prescriptions into an official inventory of Madrid’s work. In making subtle revisions, the interaction between ailments, physicians, apothecaries, and legal representatives created a new document that captures the web of relationships needed to establish a standard value for medicaments.

In transcribing Ayala’s 213 disorganized slips of paper, riddled with physician’s notes and dates, the medicaments, and their curative intentions, the court documentation turned the idiosyncratic practices and customs of one family’s pharmacy into an authoritative list with the intention of comparison. From this document Ruiz de Santillana reevaluated exactly how much the Manzanedos owed, using his authority combined with the power of the court to negotiate Ayala down to 11,800 maravedís. Unlike many postmortem inventories, which move around the apothecary shop and therefore preserve a spatial organization, this functional pharmacopeia does not mention compound medicines by category, separating oils from waters and unguents from vinegars. Instead, the transcription works inversely to the numbered pile of prescriptions to inform the inventory of valued medicaments. Just as the apothecary standardized the many prescriptive slips and hands, the notary used a standardized pharmacological language acceptable for the trial. For example, the notary translates Spanish words from the prescriptions into Latin, the language conventionally used to write legal documents. Evoking Latinate categories and a mise-en-page that matched printed price lists and other forms for reference pharmacopeia, Madrid’s records are made to match more authoritative pharmacopeia structures. Once listed, impenetrable pharmaceutical jargon transforms into legible data. Data in lists makes very clear the type of medicaments that were in frequent use, their associated values and the influence of the European Galenic pharmacy. By translating the pile of recipes, the court created a formal pharmacopeia for Madrid’s shop, incidentally establishing the authority of a Valladolidan apothecary.

The Ubiquity of Spanish Roses

These trial materials, including the prescription slips and the functional pharmacopeia, bear the evidence of human negotiation, centered on familial and communal trust. The worth of these medical ingredients would be passed on to the heirs or, in this case, the widow. In his study of medicine, heresy, and Reformation politics in Spain, Bradley Mollman has shown how inquisitorial cases, including many examples involving apothecaries, offer “a rich source for understanding the dynamics of medicine, healing, and belief at a local level.”⁴² The same can be said for secular courts, which also included many voices in dynamic tension, negotiating who had the right to profit from cures. Featuring the value and worth of an apothecary shop and a physician’s debt, the Ayala v. Manzanedo trial can be read as a balancing act between the legacies of two legitimate branches of medicine.⁴³ But once categorized as a functional pharmacopeia, Madrid’s and the Manzanedo’s inventory becomes a testament to these dynamics established at the individual level, evidenced by the negotiations of prices and standards for healing. Exploring the ways one conflict between a single pharmacy and a frequent customer sets the standards for healing allows us to reflect on the formation of Spanish pharmacopeia more broadly. The trial’s materials invite us to trace the story of medicaments and take note of the absence and consistency of certain medical treatments. The reappearance of medicines suggest reliability, efficacy, and even accessibility. Rather than being an isolated case study, the Manzanedos’ relationship to pharmaceutical treatments answers questions about the status of Spanish society’s engagement with drugs in the sixteenth century. Madrid’s prescription slips become a way to read broader trends in Spanish pharmaceutical practice and medicine, like the medical use of roses. Following the Manzanedos for thirteen years of healing has shown that value was described in exchanges promising a debt absolved and as a unique insight to the practice of healing, with each prescription and line becoming “substances with bodily effects,” as Pablo Gómez has called them. These have little impact on their own; instead, early modern medicine must be understood as highly localized and contingent on ritual and belief.⁴⁴

This apothecary’s debt reclamation acts as an archive of practice, uniquely capturing one family’s belief in medicine shaped by thirteen years’ worth of rrecetas (prescriptions).⁴⁵ The Manzanedos believed in one medicament’s healing properties more than any other: their prescriptions were an ode to rose-based cures.⁴⁶ Herrero Jiménez and Tamayo Lomas determined that rose oil was the most used medicament, making up 12 percent of the total inventory, followed by violet-based syrups (7 percent) and rose syrups (7.5 percent).⁴⁷ Unlike any other medicament, rose-based cures made up 20 percent of the total inventory, a true indication of its efficacy in the Manzanedo household. Roses had a variety of uses, appearing as an oil, adherent (rosed sugar, rose honey), water (honey rose and rose), dried, as a combined drink (rosada, rosa castellana, rosa pérsica, Rosa seca), powdered, and as a vinegar.⁴⁸ The Valladolid inventory, while holding no authority over the creation of an official pharmacopeia, is home to the idiosyncrasies of one household and their ritual of healing. By following the trends of the medicaments in the inventory, like the repetition and dependance on rose medicaments, one can use it to study a localized understanding of what should and ought to be part of the early modern Spanish regional pharmacopeia. The next section gestures at fads and consistencies in medicaments in sixteenth-century Spain by following roses in motion, mentioned across other HP pharmacopeias and Spanish reference pharmacopeia.

By presumed efficacy if not by price, the Manzanedos’ preferences suggest that roses acted as the dominant form of medical treatment in their household. For example, in a prescription dated June 1565, Manzanedo asks Madrid to make a rose ointment (unguenti) solution with the best and freshest roses.⁴⁹ On May 12, 1569, Félix de Manzanedo asked for “rose syrup solution made with persicis (persian) roses” specifically for his daughter.⁵⁰ In many prescriptions, the Manzanedo family can be found extensively using the same persicis rose, which can be found in the Sevillian physician-botanist Nicolás Monardes’s 1540 publication De rosa et partibus eius.⁵¹ The rose in many forms appeared to heal the ailments pertaining to the girls of the household. While they are never named, the five children, Elena, Mayor, Antonio, Leonor, and Isabel, are often referenced in the prescription slips by a short mention, often being “for the young girl” or “for a boy.”⁵² This is misleading, while rose medicaments are the most prominent, the girls were not always prescribed rose based medicine. From 1540 to 1569, multiple prescriptions for rose syrup (syrupi rosarum, sirupi rosacei, jarabe rosado) and rose oil (azeite rrosado), are followed by a parent’s love and worry for their daughters, asking Madrid to be aware that these medicaments are to be consumed by “one of my girls.”⁵³ With their beautiful red tones and calming scent, roses have long been associated with women’s health, not as a common medicament but targeted to treat issues in menstruation and complexion. Rose-based medicaments can be found in the early editions of the Trotula, a medieval medical compendium made up of “empirical cures” to treat maladies pertaining to women’s bodies.⁵⁴ Ranging from cures for sunburn and gout, roses were part of concoctions to treat women’s ailments.⁵⁵ While rose medicaments may not appear to be a very unique material in an early modern pharmacy, the Manzanedos’ reliance on its healing properties makes one wonder if the rose really was an elixir hidden in plain sight.

The reliance on rose medicaments reflected foundational beliefs in Galenic medicine, as well as fashions of Spanish reference pharmacopeias, which insisted that roses were an essential part of any good medicine cabinet.⁵⁶ The rose has long been a sought after medicament commonly used to treat inflammation, fever, and pain or used to stop excessive flows of the body such as hemorrhage, tears, and diarrhea.⁵⁷ Mia Touw in an extensive study on the use of roses as medicine in the Middle Ages, finds that similar to the Manzanedos’ treatment of rose medicament, the rose became so popular it pushed it into “the class of wonder drug.”⁵⁸ This essential materia medica was used across various regions, including Mediterranean and Arabic cultures, with translations of these texts making their way in European apothecaries. Galen’s eye remedies in Littiere ad Corisium, first translated to Arabic and then to Catalán, mention roses in five out of the fifteen recipes.⁵⁹ Regardless of where the pharmacopeia originated, it is almost certain one could find a mention of roses amongst a plethora of medicaments. Through the study of such a consistent and transregional medicament, the Manzanedo inventory can be used to understand the treatment of materials and their value measured not only by price, but dependency. Unlike similar systemic treatments of functional pharmacopeias, what is often ignored is the resonances across similar inventories. In the case of Herrero Jiménez and Tamayo Lomas, the research relies on making a list legible through data; in this case, by tracing rose medicaments one can begin to read with the patients, physicians, and apothecaries as they created a ritual of healing.

Beginning with its earliest mention in Dioscorides, rose simples became part of the apothecary shop’s “common” list, a medicament that they truly had on hand.⁶⁰ In one of earliest documents in the HP corpus located in Barcelona, Francesc de Camp’s apothecary inventory discusses roses as part of the “common oils” alongside violets.⁶¹ This discussion of permanency is found not long after in the first version of the 1511 Concordie pharmacopolarum Barcinonensium.⁶² Here, the Barcelona apothecaries presented Rosarum as a main ingredient on the first page of recipes, a material that continued to grace the first pages of the 1535 version.⁶³ In other words, the Valladolid boticario was not merely fulfilling prescriptions or collecting recipe slips. Instead, the average boticario extensively studied the preparation and storage of medicinal herbs by engaging in serious apprenticeships and completing the Protomedicato exam.⁶⁴ By the sixteenth century, a prescription given to Madrid’s apothecary shop cited powder as originating in the workshop of Giovanni de Vigo and referenced Nicolás Florentino.⁶⁵ In the library of boticario Francisco de Viana, an inventory taken in 1541 included a copy of “Mesue” alongside “Modus faciendi” by Bernardino Laredo, published in 1527.⁶⁶ Félix Francisco Pastor Freshoso, who researched the foundations of the Valladolid boticarios between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has studied discussions guided by the authorities of Galen and Mesue on the difference in preparation for rose oil (completo) and rose onfacino (made with olive oil).⁶⁷ Manzanedo’s reliance on roses is no surprise. The materials of an apothecary only partially tell the wider story of a regional pharmacopeia developed in Valladolid. What may have been an account of medicaments, once read with rose-colored glasses, begins to appear much like a product of science and medical authorities found in the libraries of Spanish boticarios.

Roses had been central to Arabic pharmaceutical practice, like in the Galenic text first translated in Arabic. One of the earliest pharmacopeias to mention roses was the Latin translation of a formative Arabic chapter titled Liber Servitoris by Cordoba native Abū al-Qāsim al-Zahrāwī, written in the tenth century.⁶⁸ In the Middle East, the rose has historically been a symbolic plant, from representing faithfulness, to postmortem affections, to being referred to as “queen of all flowers”—its popularity far exceeded its usefulness as a “wonder drug.”⁶⁹ Paula De Vos’s detailed analysis of Liber Servitoris finds that al-Zahrāwī deemed it tedious to add the recipe for rosewater because to him, “the way to make rosewater is known by many people.”⁷⁰ Al-Zahrāwī’s text provided detailed explanations on the “common practice” of distilling and preparing rose waters, rose oils, and philosophers’ oils. Much like Galenic texts making their way into the Arabic healing practices, translations of Arabic texts became part of the what was becoming a Spanish pharmacopeia. In 1515, for example, Alonso Rodríguez de Tudela’s translation of Liber Servitoris was published in Valladolid.⁷¹ For the Manzanedos, who only were concerned about treating their family’s ailments, their inventory is part of a constant exchange of medicinal information slowly transforming a local pharmacopeia into what can be considered a transregional one. Valladolid was home to these forms of interactions, which transcended one apothecary shop and its business of healing to become part of a wider discussion on what ought to be part of any shop’s inventory.

Through an original text exploring what a boticario should have in his shop and ways to preserve medicinal substances, Tudela argues that roses were a necessary item for every apothecary. Tudela’s Castilian translation of the Compendio de los boticario, printed in Valladolid in 1515, explicitly built on Arab and Italian practices. Tudela cites Mesue for the recipes regarding aceyte rosado and aceyte violado, which were commonly found in the Manzanedo household.⁷² In Sevillano Protomédico, Andrés Zamudio de Alfaro’s compendium of medicaments apothecaries ought to have, he includes and similarly cites Mesue for four rose-related products: aceite rosado, vinegre rosado, agua rosada, and aceite rosado ofacino.⁷³ The materials of an apothecary only partially tell the wider story of the development of a regional pharmacopeia.

The protomedicato was established in 1477 by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabel I of Castilla as an effort to regulate the forms of healing across Spanish territory.⁷⁴ Including apothecaries, physicians, herbalists, and those dealing in spices (especieros), the Protomedicato sought to standardize medicine as a tool for national-building that would be used in the Spanish conquest of the Americas.⁷⁵ Apothecaries worked closely with the Protomedicato because it not only observed the efficacy of their practices, it also supervised the quality of simples and remedies distributed from the apothecary shops.⁷⁶ The apothecary shop was no simple cabinet of medicine, but a reflection of the Spanish Crown’s desire to create a consistent pharmacopeia.

By searching for these traces of the regional effects of the protomedicato exams and national efforts to standardize the practice of apothecary shop owners, one can find resonances of a long-standing Galenic pharmaceutical tradition. The discussions and reliance on Galen have been noted in De Vos’s study of Galenic pharmacies in and beyond Mexico City. She finds that in the late eighteenth century, roses “were the most commonly employed simple, listed as an ingredient in thirty-three of the compounds prescribed.”⁷⁷ Likewise when Dominican surgeon Nicolas Nicole sent a petition to the king of Spain in 1795 to open an official apothecary on Spanish territory, he sent an inventory of items to successfully treat patients, which included rose preserves.⁷⁸ Indeed, it is quite easy to find rose medicaments across many European pharmacopeias or in this case, a pharmacopeia created in the Americas, and a single medicament does not define a regional practice. What if the resonances of a single medicament allow one to read across inventories that may seem to have no similarities? A rose-based cure becomes a tool to understand the extent to which traditional inventories were developed. Take the introduction of chemical substances in traditional Galenic pharmaceutical practice in Spain between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By tracing the progressive consolidation of Galenic and chemical medicine, De Vos finds that this slow integration of chemical substances did not create a new traditional pharmacopeia; instead, it aggregated the “old” with the “new.”⁷⁹ By tracing the roots of rose-based cures, one can begin to read with and alongside the practitioners, physicians, and patients to understand what was truly valuable.

From the constant references found in foundational texts like that of Dioscordes and Mesue, the rose product is seen as a staple and a basic need for all forms of healing. The legal drama of a family and a local pharmacy offers us a collection of documents filled with the messy details of a family’s relationship with medicine and ripe for the analysis of a medicine that goes back centuries. The HP corpus offers a database of sources like these—documents that remind us of the fundamental humanity of medicine and open portals into the wider pharmaceutical arenas of communities across time and space.

Resonances and Comparing Functional Pharmacopeias

These documents are a product of cacophony of voices, calling attention to the dark corners of the Manzanedos’ medicine cabinet and the hands of the Manzanedo children consistently reaching for rose medicaments to cure their ailments. Rather than focusing on the unique remedy, reading the Ayala v. Manzanedo trial for roses brings an understanding of medicine away from the exceptional and toward the ordinary. To take seriously an “archive of practice” means reckoning with repetition. Medicaments worked because of the confidence in their efficacy, and that power was greater when their use was regularized.

Today one may not seek out roses in a local pharmacy, but the Manzanedos found this medicament indispensable in their rituals of healing. The prescription slips from Madrid’s pharmacy illuminate the extent to which roses acted as a “wonder drug” to heal the ailments of many family members, particularly the young girls of the Manzanedo household. A story of one pharmacy and family leads us to the history of a single medicament. The exercise of investigating the singular allows us to begin formulating questions about a wider region, truly understanding the reaches of one local pharmacopeia and its relationship to the beginnings of a transregional pharmaceutical practice. The HP corpus carries stories like Ayala’s and the Manzanedo’s—episodes that serve as the starting points for historians’ quests to understand regions’ culture around medicine and engagement with pharmaceutical traditions.

While the Ayala functional pharmacopeia was originally produced to reckon with a debt, the legal proceedings aim to restore trust. Uniquely capturing thirteen years of one family’s dealings in the business of healing, these prescriptions and the resulting price list are part of a standing culture of Valladolidan apothecaries driven by the trust in their medicaments without needing immediate payment. Through the notarial copying process, prescriptions became a standardized functional pharmacopeia. With the friar’s confirmation of the pharmaceutical material, the value of the medicaments were tested and validated. Even the repeated remedies offered a sense of reassurance in the efficacy of certain simples and traditional remedies. Through a discussion of what makes a pharmacopeia functional, one begins to understand the authorities and history of medicinal practice that informed such reliance on certain medicaments and preparations. Unlike published reference pharmacopeias with neat indexes, references to the great names in medicine like Galen and Mesue, preparations, and cures, this functional pharmacopeia offers a portal into one community’s role in defining the boundaries of what makes a medicament truly valuable. Given the role of roses in the Manzanedo household, perhaps monetary value is not always evidence of the true value of a medicament. The best cure was fair payment.

In what ways does healthcare boil down to a payment cure? In a recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it was found that in 2021, 9.2 million adults who were in need of prescription drugs could not afford to fully pay for their treatment.⁸⁰ Instead, patients reported having to skip doses, reduce intake, or delay refilling their prescriptions. Today, it appears that to be healthy is to afford it. In the American healthcare system, the cost of medicine is a negotiation that no longer involves the patient, the same way the Manzanedos were in their apothecarial transactions.⁸¹ Local pharmacies, often part of local chains, facilitate the transaction, but only to administer policies and costs established elsewhere. When determining a patient’s payment track, every doctor, nurse, and pharmacist asks, “Do you have insurance?”—a question that has become synonymous with accessibility to modern cures. Should the difference between sickness and health be conditional on payment?

Today, a patient–pharmacist conversation is guided by this question of payment, and one can see how Felix de Manzanedo’s and Francisco de Madrid’s relationship was meant to cure and provide these remedies. The middleman of health insurance is notably absent in Madrid and Manzanedo’s dealings.⁸² Rose water and other medicaments were not so expensive or complex that they could not be purchased out of pocket, nor were they so dangerous that experts needed to limit access to them. This put the onus of collecting payments on pharmacists, who were expected to bear the weight of the indebtedness inextricably tied to the business of making medicines. The result was that many Valladolidan apothecaries had to turn to the courts to collect money they were owed. Then as now, one cannot simply request medicaments without first thinking about the price one must pay to be cured. Looking back into early modern documents like the Ayala v. Manzanedo case, one finds that this exchange between physicians, apothecaries, and patients can be linked back to the need to be healthy and have access to cures. Should the payment cure be more than a monetary exchange? In the end, the business of healing deals with keeping a constant dependence between patients and healers through the prescription of debts instead of cures.