My friend and Fulbright colleague Matt Crawford (see his website here) has just published his first article, on the basis of research he’s done in Madrid and Seville for his dissertation on the production of quinine in the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century:
Matthew James Crawford, “‘Para desterrar las dudas y adulteraciones’: Scientific Expertise and the Attempts to Make a Better Bark for the Royal Monopoly of Quina (1751-1790),” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8:2 (2007): 193-212.
Quinine (quina in Spanish) was a tremendously important commodity, and the subject of so much scientific interest, because it was used to treat malaria.
Matt, currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, is one of a new breed of Spanish historians of science determined to dispel the “Black Legend” that surrounds Spain’s Scientific Revolution–the notion that, essentially, Spain never had a scientific revolution because the repressive Church and Inquisition stifled the sort of intellectual inquiry that was necessary to produce it. Congratulations, Matt, on a very interesting contribution to a good cause!