Animal remedies in space and time: The case of the nail of the great beast

Abstract

Late in the eighteenth century, the Welsh traveler, naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-98) devoted a long description in his Arctic Zoology to the elk (Alces alces), called the moose in North America, the largest extant species in the deer family (figure 8.1). According to Pennant , North American natives used the elk hoof in the same way it was used in Old World pharmacopeias: "The opinion of this animal's being subject to epilepsy seems to have been universal, as well as the cure it finds by scratching its ear with the hind hoof till it draws blood. That hoof has been used on Indian medicine for the falling-sickness; they apply it to the heart of the afflicted, make him hold it in his left hand, and rub his ear with it." On the other side of the Americas and almost at the same time, the Spanish military engineer and naturalist Félix de Azara (1746-1821), attributed the same property to the hooves of the Paraguayan tapir (Tapirus terrestris), a large herbivorous mammal ungulate, with a short, prehensile snout, that inhabits jungle and forest regions of South America, called mborebi by the Guaranese people, gran bestia (great beast) by the Spaniards, and anta by the Portuguese (figure 8.2). Azara remarked, "To the nails of their toes ground down and taken in powder, is attributed the power of curing epilepsy." Azara, apparently, did not observe or register this kind of practice; he was just quoting others' observations, in particular the notice that originated in the seventeenth-century chronicle on Paraguay written by the Jesuit priest Antonio Ruiz (1585-1652), who, according to Juan Ignacio de Armas, was the first to attribute antiepileptic virtues to the tapir. So Azara was neither the first nor the only one: beginning in the seventeenth century, every time the tapir was described in no matter which region of the South American lowlands, the medical virtues of its hoof reappeared over and over again. For example, in 1731 the Jesuit priest José Gumilla (1686-1750) had reported on its medical use in the Orinoco missions. Still in the nineteenth century, on the upper Essequibo in Guyana, the hoofs of a tapir were used as charms for snakebites, ray-fish stings, and fits of all kinds. Creole residents used gran bestia in Georgetown and Ecuador. Thus, referring either to the moose, elks or tapirs, to the Old or the New World, the Southern or the Northern hemispheres, the sources exhibit the recurring belief that the hooves of large mammals all called "the great beast" were valuable in treatment of human epilepsy. Pennant considered this association a kind of universal belief or a remarkable parallel to the Old World, a process in which underlying ancestral unity of humans causes them to react similarly to new and evolving situations even though they are out of touch with other groups. However, the various spatial and temporal frameworks in which these large animals appeared in connection with epilepsy pose a very interesting problem for global history and, in particular, for the circulation of animal-based remedies in the age of sail. The transfer of names, virtues, and objects happened more than once and involved regions far beyond the Americas. As a result, this chapter presents a preliminary survey by which to track, in the longue durée, the path of a remedy that appeared in therapeutics on both sides of the Atlantic. Mentioned in the natural histories, books of remedies, and charitable handbooks that proliferated in the Old World and European settlements from the seventeenth century onward, the gran bestia is a good case from which to investigate how the transfer of a name between continents involved the transfer of medical virtues and properties of the materials implicated. This example illustrates how commerce in medicines, skins, and other animal products contributed to associating -long before Linnaeus- different kinds of animals from different cultural worlds.