Globalizing Chocolate and Tobacco

Medical Exchange in the Early Modern World

Susan G. Polansky

2026
228 pages
$35.95
ISBN 9781684485994
Campos Ibéricos

This groundbreaking volume explores two early and opposing Spanish medical perspectives on chocolate and other New World substances. In the early 1600s, doctors Bartolomé Marradón and Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma returned from travels to the Americas with starkly different views: Marradón 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 Marradón'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.

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Reviews

"An absolute delight to read. Scholars and foodies alike will find this work both stimulating and revelatory." - Carolyn A. Nadeau, author of Food Matters: Alonso Quijano's Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain

"This volume offers excellent bilingual (Spanish and English) editions of two influential seventeenth-century tracts in New World pharmacology as well as useful historical discussions of their cultural contexts and reception in Europe. As such, this volume will be of interest to both the historiography and pedagogy of early modern science, medicine, and the rise of a global consumer culture." - Ralph Bauer, author of The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

"This new edition and translation of the texts of Marradón and Colmenero will shed light on the lives and works of the two doctors, furthering our understanding of the reception of chocolate in Spain and around Europe." - Erin Cowling, author of Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature

"This research examines one of the earliest medical debates regarding the benefits of chocolate, a new beverage spreading from Spain through the rest of Europe. The author includes texts of the 1600s debate in their original Spanish as well as English translation. The work should be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about centuries of debate over the health benefits of chocolate - a debate that continues today." - Ross F. Collins, author of Chocolate: A Cultural Encyclopedia

About the author:

SUSAN G. POLANSKY is a teaching professor emerita of Hispanic studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 9781684486007; Ebook: $35.95, 9781684486014