The Absence of Brazilian Medicinal Plants in Portuguese Writings

“Upon sowing, everything grows!”—wrote a Navy registrar, expressing amazement with Brazil’s luxuriant nature in a 1500 report to the Portuguese king (Caminha 1981).^[1] Pero Vaz de Caminha, a registrar with Pedro Alvares de Cabral’s pioneering expedition to Brazil signed this letter to the Portuguese king on May 1st, 1500. It was first published in 1817; see C. Prado Junior, “Introdução”, in Casal, Corografia Brasilica, xxix. This statement was an early manifestation of European excitement with the exuberance and uniqueness of the flora in Terra Brasilis. From that time onward, European travelers, missionaries, and physicians, never stopped reporting on previously unknown plants and animals, as well as on Amerindian civilizations. While many of those visitors spent some time among Indigenous populations, to make their presence in the “New” World permanent, Europeans required alternative food sources. Shipments from Europe were both expensive and sporadic, and more often than not also arrived in a damaged condition. In addition, they had to learn how to identify unknown diseases and their respective treatments. Therefore, surveying their immediate surroundings proved essential for survival. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that the earliest settlers, including Jesuit missionaries, immediately explored the wealth of the three kingdoms of nature. Despite this, the fact that this knowledge was omitted from any publications written in Portuguese for many centuries still puzzles scholars to this day.

The present essay focuses on knowledge about Brazilian medicinal plants. Or rather, it focuses on its absence from writings published in Portuguese from colonial times onward. Indeed, observations made as early as the 1500s only reached the wider public many centuries later. The Jesuit missionary José de Anchieta (1534–1597), who arrived in Brazil in 1553, offers a representative example. Members of the Society of Jesus sent to their headquarters in Rome reports that included long lists and comprehensive descriptions of Brazilian natural products that could serve as either food or medicine.

However, only a few of Anchieta’s writings—including a grammar of the Tupi language—were published in the sixteenth century (Anchieta 1562, 150-71; 1595). The lion’s share of his letters became known only four hundred years later, in 1933 (Anchieta 1933). Additionally, while Anchieta provided descriptions of several native plants, he omitted the names given by Indigenous populations. Such exclusion continues to hinder their identification to this day.

The same can be said of the plants that Jesuit missionaries used in medical prescriptions filled at their colégios.^[2] In Brazil, Jesuit colégios were much more than educational institutions. They were full settlement projects, including also other facilities, such as apothecary shops, hospital, and libraries, in addition to churches (Ferreira Jr and Bittar 2012). This is a most regrettable situation, because those prescriptions frequently targeted common illnesses affecting Indigenous people assimilated into the missions. The historical record kept on  Brazil’s medicinal plants only worsened in 1759,  following the expulsion of the Jesuit Order from Portugal and all areas of its empire and the subsequent destruction of countless valuable records.

In turn, the Portuguese Crown had no intention of sharing information about the immense riches held in its American territories (Alfonso-Goldfarb and Ferraz 1988). Following the discovery of gold mines in the present-day state of Minas Gerais at the end of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese Crown dramatically curtailed the transit of people to Brazil.^[3]See a series of reports by travelers from 1531 to 1800 describing the attempts to land in Rio de Janeiro; see especially the one by James Cook mentioning that Joseph Banks had to disguise himself to leave the boat and make some studies around the town. Many of the reports mention that Portuguese government tried to conceal the ways to get Minas Gerais (França 1999, 126-141). Publications that could have come in and out of the colony were censored, and local printing presses were banned. This state of affairs lasted until 1808, when the Portuguese Court escaped the Napoleonic invasion of the metropole and took up residency in Rio de Janeiro (Alfonso-Goldfarb and Ferraz 2002, 5-7).

For this reason, century-long delays, if not complete losses, were the rule rather than the exception. Gabriel Soares de Sousa (1540–1591), a farmer and sugar mill owner in the present-day state of Bahia, wrote in the mid-sixteenth century, Tratado descritivo do Brasil em 1587 (Descriptive treatise of Brazil in 1587). In this book, he described several aspects of everyday life, including sources of medicines, especially plants. However, this work was first published only in 1825. The fact that de Sousa died while searching for the mythical El Dorado probably contributed to this outcome (Ferraz 2004; Monteiro 2003). As in the case of Jesuits’ observations, knowledge on relevant native medicinal plants also did not see the light for more than two centuries.

Knowledge on Brazilian nature also escaped by chance the “ax” of Portuguese censorship, although it was published as foreign translations. One example is that of the Jesuit Fernão Cardim (c. 1540–1625), who travelled to Brazil twice, first from 1583 to 1589, and a second time from 1603 to 1625. During his second journey, the ship in which he travelled was seized by English pirates and Cardim was jailed in England for two years. Some of his earliest notes somehow arrived in the hands of Samuel Purchas (c. 1577–1626), who published them in 1625 with the title, “A Treatise of Brasil written by a Portugall, which has long lived there” (Purchas, 1289–1320). Cardim’s original writings, in Portuguese, and under his own name, were first partially published in the nineteenth century, while the entire set only saw the light of day in 1925.

Still, the Portuguese penchant for secrecy did nothing to decrease European eagerness for more information about Brazil. In addition to the book by Purchas, we may also mention those written by other travelers since the 1550s. For example, the French explorers Jean de Léry (1536–1613) and André Thevet (1516–1590) and the German adventurer Hans Staden (c. 1525–c. 1576) (Léry 1578; Thevet 1557; Staden 1557). As the now easily recognizable pattern goes, these books were published in Portuguese only in the twentieth century.

For hundreds of years after the first arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil, the knowledge on its flora was publicized by foreigners. The first major work on Brazilian plants was the work of the Dutchman Willem Piso (1611–1678) and the German Georg Marggraf (1610–1644). Both travelled to northeastern Brazil in 1637, when the Dutch West India Company called Piso to replace the deceased personal physician of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), the governor of Dutch Brazil. With a degree in medicine, Piso developed a significant interest in natural history and saw his sojourn to Olinda (in the present-day state of Pernambuco) as a unique opportunity to make observations of Brazilian nature. Their joint work, published in Latin by Joannes De Laet (1581–1649) for Elsevier, in 1648, was titled Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. It remained the most comprehensive reference for Brazilian flora until the monumental Flora Brasiliensis, started by the Bavarian Carl von Martius (1794–1868), in 1858, following a three-year journey in Brazil, from 1817 to 1820.

All the aforementioned writings, especially Piso’s and Marcgrave’s, served as sources for countless pharmacopeias and works of materia medica published in eighteenth-century Europe— during the so-called “age of the pharmacopeia.” This is how native American plants found their way into European therapeutic and pharmaceutic practice. In Portuguese territory, it was a foreign, Jean Vigier, who incorporated a section on Brazilian plants into his pharmacopoeia. This inclusion was based on the foundational works of Piso and Marcgrave, as will be elaborated later.

To be sure, in the 1700s, the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil were more interested in sources of gold, silver, and gems, and less on what the land could produce. In addition, the more the colony depended on goods brought from the metropole, the better to the Crown. Trade of shipments under other European flags were banned, as were economic activities such as manufacturing cloth (Silva 1828, 394-5).

Brazilian medicinal plants first earned a place in a pharmacy book written in Portuguese not through the work of a Brazilian or a Portuguese author, but of a Frenchman who had moved to Portugal. We allude to Jean Vigier, (1662–1723) and his Pharmacopeia ulyssiponense, galenica e chymica, from 1716, in which he devoted a separate section to American (particularly Brazilian) plants for the first time in the history of this genre in Portugal. His primary source was Piso’s book.

No one else seemed interested in following in Vigier’s steps. Agostinho Albano da Silveira Pinto (1785–1850) appended a section on American—especially Brazilian—plants in a revised edition of his Código Pharmaceutico Lusitano (Portuguese pharmaceutical codex), from 1846.  However, the reason for introducing the appended section was that he had found out that the first edition had been established as a mandatory reference in Brazil. Therefore, Pinto believed to be helping physicians and apothecaries in Brazil, since they lacked an official national pharmacopeia.

However, the problem was not just the lack of a formal pharmacopeia, but that of comprehensive information on native medicinal plants in general. After the ban on printing presses was lifted in 1808, one of the holders of the two single medicine chairs in Brazil, José Maria Bomtempo (1774–1843), published a work on materia medica in 1814. Based on Erasmus Darwin’s (1731–1802) Zoonomia (Bomtempo 1814, ix), Bomtempo’s book included a handful of plants described as “native to Brazil.” Yet, on a closer look, we could establish that most of these plants actually grew in other parts of the Americas— although Bomtempo only listed the copaiba (Copaifera spp.) plant as “indigenous to Brazil.”

The first Brazilian national pharmacopeia was published in 1929, following a regional predecessor, Farmacopeia Paulista, released in 1917 for mandatory use in the state of São Paulo. Neither, however, paid significant attention to native plants—which were progressively removed in each successive edition of Farmacopeia Brasileira (Ferraz, Alfonso-Goldfarb and Waisse 2012).

To conclude, in this essay we have called attention to the almost universal absence of Brazilian native medicinal plants in sources written in Portuguese from the beginning of Portuguese colonization until the Brazilian empire. Thus, how can anyone learn about the history of knowledge and uses of these plants? One possible path is through intercultural studies involving Indigenous populations. In the case of Brazil, however, decimation and acculturation present significant hindrances (Schaden 1963). A wealth of knowledge and expertise was lost, and a considerable part of the surviving information and practices contain unfathomable hybrid constituents. An alternative approach could begin with a general mapping of extant documents, such as those described above, to then select some plants for in-depth interdisciplinary studies. More specifically, these kinds of studies ought to track down the history of the knowledge about Brazilian plants, with an eye towards continuities and discontinuities in the production and transit of knowledge about them–as well as in their distinct uses in different times and places. Much still needs to be done in the case of the history of the Brazilian native flora.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

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