Medicine in colonial Moquegua, Peru: plants, wine and Belén de Locumbilla

ABSTRACT

Locumbilla, a rural colonial bodega or wine estate (heredad) in Moquegua, southern Peru, was briefly a hospital for ailing native Andean vineyard workers before its owner endowed a hospital, built by the Bethlehemite hospitaller order. Botanical remains recovered in excavations at the bodega included three items of indigenous healing, Datura, molle berries and soapberry, and an introduced item: castor beans. Their presence suggests that the workers may have availed themselves of traditional healers, and that the heredad might have cultivated castor bean, in addition to growing grapes for wine and brandy.

KEYWORDS:

• Herbal healing
• colonial Moquegua
• Bethlehemite order
• wine and brandy

Acknowledgements

I thank John Haller for his careful reading of an earlier version of this manuscript; two anonymous reviewers for extraordinarily helpful comments and suggestions for further reading; and Don Rice for preparing the figures.

Disclosure statement

The author has no financial interest or benefit deriving from the research.

Notes

1. Religious hospitaller charitable organizations began as knightly orders during the Crusades.

2. San Juan de Dios (Saint John of God), a Spanish soldier and shepherd, embarked on a life of charitable work after a religious conversion. He founded his first hospital in 1535 and the Hospitaller Order of the Brothers of Saint John of God was founded in his name in 1572, 22 years after his death.

3. Saint Anthony of Padua is best known as patron of lost things, but his patronage is also extended to harvests, the sick and the elderly. He died of ergot poisoning, a fungus found on rye and other grains that can cause convulsions and gangrene.

4. The Samegua zone of the valley is heavily populated and has seen major modern construction, which led to the destruction of the area’s bodegas. Because of the extent of the damage, neither of these two ruins was shovel-tested, mapped or excavated.

5. Alkaloids are naturally occurring organic compounds that have significant physiological and pharmacological (medical) effects on humans and other animals. An anonymous reviewer suggested that the seeds recovered at Locumbilla might be Brugmansia or even Solandra, related genera in the Solanaceae family, rather than Datura. These have similar ranges of tropane alkaloids (e.g. atropine, noratropine, hyoscyamine; scopolamine in Brugmansia) as Datura, but in different proportions (Knab 1977, 81). Brugmansia is used in divination and can cause hallucinations; it may be a sedative or anesthetic (Rätsch 2005). Virtually all parts of the plants are psychoactive and may be ingested by smoking or making an infusion of the leaves (Rätsch 2005).

6. Andean medicine has some of the characteristics of humoural medicine (Bastien 1981, 605–8; see also Foster [1953]). For early Spanish humoural medicine and views of the body – especially the importance of traditional Iberian foods and the role of wheat bread and grape wine in transubstantiation, see Rebecca Earle (2010).

7. At some point (mid-nineteenth century?) the name of the patron of the Bethlehemite hospital, which was originally built on the grounds of a mid-seventeenth-century hospital named for San Juan de Dios, was changed from San Antonio de Padua back to San Juan de Dios.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities [RO-21477-87];National Geographic Society [3256-086,3566-87,4065-89].

Notes on contributors

Prudence M. Rice

Prudence M. Rice is distinguished professor emerita of anthropology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she was also associate vice chancellor for research. She has carried out archaeological field projects in the Maya lowlands (Guatemala) and Andean Peru (Moquegua). Her research specialization is pottery analysis.