[A New Spain medication: magisterial oil and salutiferous liquor]. / Un medicamento novohispano: aceite magistral y licor salutífero.

During the 16th century, physicians who lived and cured New Spain's population, attended their profession privately and institutionally; few of them were authors of medical works, and it is not easy to discover one who invented and used successfully medicament of his own development. We have found one, Joan Martel, a Spaniard, who came to New Spain and here cured and served. He invented and used a salutiferous oil and liquor widely accepted by other physicians, but mainly by the neighbors of Mexico City. In reward for his successfully medicament, he received the appointment of physician at the Royal Court Prison. This article is dedicated to him, and his until now unknown life, his work and the relation between his oil with a similar product in Spain. This study forms part of larger social-historical research that deals with "Physicians in New Spain, their social and professional roles (16 to 19 centuries)."

Prospecting for oil.

From the 1770s to the 1880s agriculturists and cooks sought to develop culinary oils from plants. Thomas Jefferson's attempts to introduce the olive into the agriculture of the United States, as a partial substitute for lard in cookery and as a cheap oleo for the consumption of slaves, met with limited success, even in the southeast, because periodic freezes and high humidity thwarted the development of groves. Southern slaves from West Africa supplied their own oil, derived from benne (Sesamum indicum). Benne oil was merely one feature of an elaborate African-American cuisine employing sesame that included benne soup, benne and greens, benne and hominy, benne candy, and benne wafers. Only the last item has survived as a feature of regional and ethnic cookery. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, planter experimentalists began the commercial scale production of benne oil, establishing it as the primary salad oil and the second favored frying medium in the southern United States. It enjoyed acceptance and moderate commercial success until the refinement of cottonseed oil in the 1870s and 1880s. Cotton seed, a waste product of the south's most vital industry, was turned into a revenue stream as David Wesson and other scientists created a salad oil and frying medium designedly tasteless and odorless, and a cooking fat, hydrogenated cottonseed oil (Cottonlene or Crisco) that could cheaply substitute for lard in baking. With the recent recovery of regional foodways, both the olive and sesame are being revived for use in the neo-southern cookery of the twenty-first century.

Las grasas y aceites en la nutrición humana: algo de su historia / Fats and oils in the human nutrition: an historical overview

Las grasas y aceites, también identificadas como materias grasas, constituyen la forma mayoritariamente comestible de los lípidos. Actualmente muestran un gran desarrollo tecnológico y nutricional, aunque su utilización en la alimentación y en usos domésticos comenzó hace muchos siglos. La Revolución Industrial significó un salto cuantitativo en el conocimiento de las materias grasas. El francés Eugene Chevreul fue el iniciador de la investigación científica en grasas y aceites. Jean-Baptiste Dumas en Francia y Justus Liebig, en Alemania, dieron origen a los primeros conceptos sobre la importancia nutricional de las grasas y aceites. Hypolitte Mége-Mouriés desarrollo un procedimiento para obtener un producto similar a las actuales margarinas. El alemán Franz Knoop fue el descubridor del proceso bioquímico de metabolización de los ácidos grasos conocido como beta oxidación. Los norteamericanos George y Mildred Burr descubrieron la esencialidad de los ácidos grasos, y las investigaciones de los ingleses Haslan y Chick, en forma independiente, caracterizaron las primeras lipoproteínas. Este trabajo resume en forma no exhaustiva los primeros descubrimientos relacionados con el rol nutricional de las grasas y de los aceites.

Fats and oils, also identified as fats, are the main components of edible lipids. The technological and the nutritional knowledge of fats and oils is at present very well developed, however the utilization of fats as foods or for domestic uses was initiated many centuries ago. The named Industrial Revolution represented a significant quantitative development in the knowledge of fats and oils. The French Eugene Chevreul was probably the first scientific who studied the properties of fats and oils. Another French citizen, Jean-Baptiste Dumas together with the German scientist Justus Liebig, were the first researchers who intended to explain the nutritional properties of fats. The French pharmacist Hypolitte Mége-Mouriés was involved in the preparation of the first fat emulsion which resembles a margarine. The German scientist Franz Knoop described the biochemical process known as beta oxidation of fatty acids. George and Mildred Burr, both American scientists, were the first to describe the essentiality of fatty acids, and the English Haslan and Chick independently isolated the first lipoproteins. The present description review, although not exhaustively, the main discoveries about the nutritional role of fats and oils.

Fight for survival: the life of a Hansen's disease sufferer through his correspondence with Adolpho Lutz.

This project presents the complete set of letters between the family of a Hansen's disease (leprosy) sufferer in the state of Maranhão, in the Northeast of Brazil, and the doctor and bacteriologist Adolpho Lutz. For more than twenty years Fabricio Caldas de Oliveira and Numa Pires de Oliveira, father and son, exchanged a steady flow of letters with the scientist in pursuit of a cure for the disease that had assailed Numa since childhood. The 24 letters compiled here paint a unique portrait of the medical and social drama confronted by this family, and the results of the use of chaulmoogra oil and other medications in their search for alternative treatments.

[Supply of medicines for the Dutch whaling and salt trade in de seventeenth century]. / Geneesmiddelen voor de traan en zouthandel in de 17de eeuw.

During the seventeenth century the small Dutch nation with a population of no more than 1.5 million people played a prominent role in the whale oil and salt trade. Two reports discovered in the Archives in The Hague and Delft are dealing with the provision of medical and pharmaceutical services during their extensive maritime commerce. Surgeon chests destinated for whaling explicitly contained medicines to treat scurvy, respiratory illnessses and musculoskeletal diseases. The workers exploiting the saltpans in Arguin, near the northwestern coast of Afrika, were in need for drugs to cure gastrointestinal complaints and inflammatory conditions of the mouth.

Preparation of ethereal oils (Al-Duhoun) by Ibn Al-Quff (13th century A.D.).

Ibn Al-Quff was born in Damascus. He learned medicine from Ibn Abi Usaibia. Ibn Al-Quff was excelled in medicine as well as in Surgery. He wrote several books, of which was "Al-Qumdah" (The Authority on Surgery). Another book was "Al-Shafi" (The Healer) on medicine. In the book "The Authority on Surgery", Ibn Al-Quff has devoted a special chapter, on the preparation of ethereal oils, which was commonly known as Al-Duhoun. He has described about 34 different oils together with their medical action.

[Archaelogical documentation of the atmospheric pollution in antiquity]. / Documentazioni paleopatologiche dell'inquinamento atmosferico nell'antichita.

Authors examines the paleopathologic evidences of the atmosferic pollution in ancient time, point out the attention on two principal findings: pulmonar anthracosis and lead exposure. Pulmonar anthracosis is present in many mummified bodies and was due to the deposition on the pulmonar alveoli of carbon particles coming from the combustion of oils or vegetables for illumination, cooking or heating. Lead atmosferic pollution was very high between V century B.C. and III century A.D. in the North emisphere, in consequence to the impressive quantity of lead produced by Greek and Roman metallurgic technology (perhaps 80,000 metric tons per year around the start of I century AD). Cumulative lead fallout to the Greenland Ice Sheet during these eight centuries was as high as 15 percent of that caused by the massive use of lead alkyl additives in gasoline since the 1930s. Finally, the high atmosferic lead concentration caused a high exposure of humans to the lead: in fact paleopathologists, have clarely demonstrated a high quantity of lead concentration in the human bone dated to the period between III century B.C. and VI century AD circa.