BEZOAR TRADE AND SCIENCE

The small glass jar containing our Bezoar Stone specimen was kept in a splendid cupboard containing some five hundred similar jars in the Salvador Cabinet in Barcelona. It took its place beside objects with labels such as Pedra Bezoardica, Lapides Bezoar Porci, Lapis Bezoar Orientalis, Lapides Isti Reperti in Pene Suis, Lapis Bezoar ex Equus Marinus, Bezoar de Serpiente, Lapis Bezoar ex Capra, and so on. The cupboard of the cabinet in question was made by Josep Salvador i Riera (1690–1761), only a few years after Hans Sloane’s notable discussion of bezoars appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of 1749. Sloane had described the ‘Rhinoceros bezoar’ from Mombasa and another stone found ‘in the Head of the most venomous Snake of the East Indies called Cobra de Cabelo’. In a letter to the Royal Society, Sloane relied upon the authority of the Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali of Francesco Redi (1686), in which the Tuscan physician expounded his experiments with bezoars of various kinds, including that of the American iguana, as well as other remarkable products of both Indies. In short, that some bezoars found themselves adjacent to others on a reserved shelf in a Barcelona apothecary reflected both the scientific controversies regarding New World nature and the position of its products in an increasingly globalised world shaped by the inseparable duo of the two Indies, first united by Iberian trade and collecting networks.