Uma trajetória por escrito: Pedro Montenegro SJ. e sua materia medica misionera

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the trajectory of Pedro Montenegro. Born in Spain in 1663, he served at the General Hospital of Madrid where he accomplished his technical training. Years later, he immigrated to America , where, in 1691, became involved in the Company of Jesus, and even as a religious, continued to perform crafts involving the healing arts, both in Córdoba, and in the Apostles and Martyrs missions, where he died in 1728. In order to reconstitute his trajectory, we used the documentation of institutions that were part of his life, such as the Hospital of Madrid, Protomedicato and the Company of Jesus. The authorship of Materia Medica Misionera written in 1710 is attributed to the Jesuit brother Montenegro, a work considered to be one of the main treaties of medical botany of the colonial period. The analysis of the work enabled us to discuss aspects concerning the authorship and its preparation process and also to identify and evaluate the appropriations that its author did of European conceptions of medicine as well as the resulting reinterpretation obtained by the contact with the indigenous people and experiences that he made with the Native American medicinal plants.