Ambire, an Amerindian remedy for bites and poisons
During the last decades of the sixteenth and the first ones of the
seventeenth century, the Spanish surgeon Pedro López de León worked at
the San Sebastian hospital in the city of Cartagena de Indias in the New
Kingdom of Granada. At the time, Cartagena was the most important port
of the Spanish empire in the Caribbean and the official entry of all
the slave trade coming into South America. Not surprisingly, San
Sebastian was the busiest hospital in the region. Drawing from his work
at the hospital and around the region surrounding Cartagena and the
wider Caribbean, López de León wrote a medical/surgical treatise called Practica y teorica de las apostemas en general y particular that
detailed his experiences treating patients from all over the Atlantic
while using state of the art surgical and medical techniques, and
incorporating treatments he first saw in the New World.
The
portada of the first edition of Pedro López de León’s Practica y
teorica de las apostemas published in Sevilla in 1628. Credit: Google
Books.
Salient among the treatments López de León details in his work was
his use of an antidote he learned from Amerindian practitioners in the
Caribbean coast of the New Kingdom of Granada. This treatment was, in
his words, the only effective remedy against the bites of native snakes
that, López de León thought, “were worst than the vipers of Spain.” The
famous theriac from Toledo, a variation of the common medieval European
panacea for poison, was completely ineffective against New-World snakes’
poison. When one of these snakes bit a person, López de León, said,
health practitioners should instead use ambire—a remedy he had
learned from Amerindian health specialists. Ambire was “a mix of many
counter-herbs, tobacco juice and honey.” Amerindians cooked these
ingredients until the resulting liquid was “as thick as the egypciaco
ointment, and with the same color and consistency.” Ambire was “so
strong and with such virtue,” López de León maintained, that if a person
who had been bitten by a snake “drinks the weight of a real [3.5 gm.]”
of ambire “dissolved in wine or water” within fifteen minutes of the
snake’s bite, or that of any other poisonous animal, the remedy would
stop “and kill” the poison and “repair the heart.” López de León
recommended that—besides administering ambire orally to patients bitten
by poisonous animals—health practitioners should “cut and suck the bite
wound” and put “ambire macerated with four garlic cloves in a mortar” on
the wound which should be then covered. This procedure, including the
drinking of the ambire potion, should be repeated after three, seven,
and thirteen hours. If the recipe was prepared correctly and the
procedure followed strictly, “most patients would be cured,” López de
León maintained.
Remedies for “Fresh Wounds” in Pedro López de León’s Practica y teorica de las apostemas general y particular (1628), 160.
More impressively, ambire served as a prophylactic against any
“poison” that “one will be given” during a day. Death, one should
remember, lurked around every corner in the early modern world, and
poisons of all sorts (and not only of animal origin) were a particularly
common menace. In order to be protected López de León said, a person
should “put three drops of ambire” in her palm and “lick them every
morning.” According to the Spanish surgeon, this was a remedy that was
highly esteemed by both Amerindians and Spaniards. Everybody in the
region thought that ambire was far better than theriac. After all,
ambire protected not only against physical but also spiritual poisons.
Ambire made people expel the “spells through the mouth or anus” in the
form of vomit or diarrhea. López de León himself had seen people that,
after having been treated for spells with ambire, “had expelled bones of
little toads,” a common description in the New Kingdom of Granada of
the widespread bundles of evil associated with witchcraft, “in the
quantity of an escudilla [a small bowl].”
López de León’s account of the uses of ambire is an illuminating
example of the vibrant, multi-originated, and epistemologically diverse
world of early modern Caribbean medicine. It showcases an era of
pharmacological exchange, and of challenges to old Western medical
traditions (including that of the quintessential Galenic remedy,
theriac) on the basis of experiences gained from exchanges with native
populations around the globe. It also reminds us of the fluid avenues
linking the human body with the physical and spiritual realms in the
ideation about nature of early modern people
Reference:
León, Pedro López de. Pratica
y teorica de las apostemas en general y particular: questiones y
praticas de cirugia de heridas, llagas y otras cosas nuevas y
particulares. Sevilla: Luys Estupiñan, 1628. 198.
