Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India

Goa, in the middle of the sixteenth century. One evening, Dr. Ruano, a former fellow student from Salamanca and Alcalá, calls on Garcia de Orta. He has made the voyage to India for one reason only: to learn the truth about the drugs, spices and fruits of the East. Orta, a Portuguese physician long settled in India, promises to say only what he has seen or has from trustworthy witnesses, and Ruano writes everything down in a book where his questions are arranged in alphabetical order.

Fifty-nine conversations begin, from aloes to betel. Ceylon cinnamon, Malabar pepper, nutmeg from Banda, camphor from Borneo, opium, bezoar, diamonds: for each drug, Orta sets Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny and Avicenna against what he has tasted, bought and treated. He has served Captain Martim Afonso de Sousa, cured the Nizam Shah of the Deccan, and leased the island of Bombay from the king. The servant Antónia brings in the dishes, the Hindu physician Malupa comes to speak of turbith, and the talk turns to chess, trained elephants, cholera, the durians of Malacca and the temples of the island of Elephanta.

Printed in Goa in 1563, this book vindicates experience against the books. Will Ruano go home with his Salamanca certainties, or with another world in his notes?