Apothecaries and the Art of Pharmacy in New Spain and the Hispanic World

FAIN: FT-249004-16

Paula Susan De Vos
San Diego State University Foundation (San Diego, CA 92182-1931)

A history of the pharmaceutical craft and its development as a major industry in Latin America.

I am applying for a 2016 NEH Summer Stipend to support the completion of a book manuscript by August. At present, I have final drafts of 4 of the book’s 9 chapters and need time to finish revising the other 5 drafted chapters. A Summer Stipend would allow me to forgo teaching a summer school course (which I have taught each of the past four years) in order to finish revisions and submit the full manuscript by August to the University of Chicago Press. The book, a history of pharmacy in colonial Mexico and the Spanish Atlantic, traces the ancient and medieval Mediterranean origins of pharmaceutical practice, its transmission to colonial Mexico, and its subsequent transformation from a highly specialized “art,” or artisanal practice, to the beginnings of an industrialized enterprise of chemical synthesis, mass manufacture, and big business.

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