Between tradition and experience: the emergence of American knowledge in the European

Abstract

This research shows us how the transmission of the botanical knowledge of pre-Hispanic societies to Europe has allowed the integration of the American pharmacopoeia to the general dynamics of scientific knowledge at the medical, cosmographic, astronomical and technical levels. This has been possible from the chronicles of the Indies and through the development of a process of overcoming the serious Eurocentric limitations of the historical study of medicine. The data collected by the author show the enormous importance of the subject of American nature and the contribution of this to the epistemology of medical science. This revelation generated a broad and at the same time descriptive and interpretative process by the Europeans since the beginning of the sixteenth century.