Views on Memory and Treatment of Cognitive Impairment in 17th-Century Spain

Abstract

Memory and its care were significant sociocultural and scientific topics in early modern Spain. Although a major interest in memory was related to its legal and rhetorical implications, medical treatises discussing memory, cognitive impairment, and its treatment began to appear in the 16th and 17th century. Among these treatises, Disputationes phylosophicæ ac medicæ super libros Aristotelis de memoria, et reminiscentia (Philosophical and medical arguments on Aristotle's “De memoria et reminiscentia”), published in 1629 by the physician Juan Gutiérrez de Godoy, is unique in that it is entirely devoted to the medical aspects of memory. Although many of its concepts are now superseded, the treatise is valuable to understand the views on memory and cognitive impairment in 17th-century Spain and their sources, as Gutiérrez quoted many classical, medieval, and contemporary scholars and physicians. The book, written in Latin, is exclusively devoted to memory from a physiologic and medical point of view, with chapters on the classification of memory loss, a description of its causes (including old age, something not widely recognized before), and several chapters on its prevention and treatment, with a fascinating emphasis on confectio anacardina, or anacardium, an intranasal concoction made with the “marking nut,” the fruit of the Semecarpus anacardium tree (also known as Malacca bean), with alleged memory-enhancing properties. We review Gutiérrez's Disputationes phylosophicæ, putting it into the wider intellectual and social context in the Europe of its time, and discuss the relevance and purported neuropharmacologic effects of anacardina.