Globalizing Chocolate and Tobacco: Medical Exchange in the Early Modern World [Spanish]

By Susan G. Polansky

This groundbreaking volume explores two early and opposing Spanish medical perspectives on chocolate and other New World substances. In the early 1600s, doctors Bartolom Marrad n and Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma returned from travels to the Americas with starkly different views: Marrad n cautioned against tobacco and offered only limited approval of chocolate, while Colmenero vigorously defended chocolate's health benefits. Their writings, translated and circulated across Europe, helped transform chocolate from a medicinal drink into a global commodity. Featuring the first bilingual edition of Marrad n's Dialogue (1618)--in full Spanish and English--and a new bilingual presentation of Colmenero's influential Curious Treatise (1631), this book provides rare insight into early modern medical thought, cultural exchange, and the globalization of taste. Essential for readers of food history, early modern medicine, and transatlantic interchange, it uniquely reveals how debates over health, culture, and commerce brewed in a cup of chocolate.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN: 1684486009
• ISBN13: 9781684486007
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher