Circulation and production of knowledge and scientific practices in southern America in the eighteenth century: an analysis of Materia medica misionera, a manuscript by Pedro Montenegro (1710).

The article analyzes a 1790 manuscript copy of Materia medica misionera, a book written in 1710 by a Jesuit, Pedro Montenegro. Alongside knowledge of a magical or religious nature, and exotic ingredients for the recipes, this work also contains the unmistakable presence of Hippocratic and Galenic conceptions and a growing empiricism, characteristic of the scientific transformations seen in the eighteenth century. The analysis of this work also prompts reflections about the diffusion, circulation and production of pharmacological and medical knowledge in the first half of the eighteenth century within the missions and colleges installed in the area that was the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, southern America.