Innovación médica e instituciones científicos francesas: procesos de americanización en el siglo XVIII

Abstract

Many recent books have shown that the American world was a fascinating as well as complex field, where the cultural encounter was particularly rich and fertile, at the crossway of Amerindian, African, European and Asiatic cultures. This is especially true of medical topics, which involve botany, ancestral recipes, books, new experimentations, life, death, and sometimes a faint trace of magic. Studying the story of some American medical therapies which made their way to Europe, some of them having a great destiny during the 18th Century, this paper analyses some ways and means of Americanization, under the light of French scientific and medical institutions.

Keywords

• medicine
• American cures
• scientific institutions
• ginseng
• simarouba
• lizards