From the Department of Neurology (J.-A.P.), New York University Grossman School of Medicine; and Royal Academy of Medicine of Granada (F.P.), Spain.
Neurology. 2022 Sep 5;99(10):424-427. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000201025.
Memory and its care were significant sociocultural and scientific topics in early modern Spain. Although a major interest in memory was related to its legal and rhetorical implications, medical treatises discussing memory, cognitive impairment, and its treatment began to appear in the 16th and 17th century. Among these treatises, ( "De memoria et reminiscentia"), published in 1629 by the physician Juan Gutiérrez de Godoy, is unique in that it is entirely devoted to the medical aspects of memory. Although many of its concepts are now superseded, the treatise is valuable to understand the views on memory and cognitive impairment in 17th-century Spain and their sources, as Gutiérrez quoted many classical, medieval, and contemporary scholars and physicians. The book, written in Latin, is exclusively devoted to memory from a physiologic and medical point of view, with chapters on the classification of memory loss, a description of its causes (including old age, something not widely recognized before), and several chapters on its prevention and treatment, with a fascinating emphasis on , or anacardium, an intranasal concoction made with the "marking nut," the fruit of the tree (also known as Malacca bean), with alleged memory-enhancing properties. We review Gutiérrez's , putting it into the wider intellectual and social context in the Europe of its time, and discuss the relevance and purported neuropharmacologic effects of .
记忆及其护理是早期现代西班牙重要的社会文化和科学主题。尽管人们对记忆的主要兴趣与其法律和修辞含义有关，但讨论记忆、认知障碍及其治疗的医学论文在 16 世纪和 17 世纪开始出现。在这些论文中，（"De memoria et reminiscentia"），由医生胡安·古铁雷斯·德戈多伊于 1629 年出版，是唯一一篇完全致力于记忆的医学方面的论文。尽管它的许多概念现在已经过时，但该论文对于了解 17 世纪西班牙对记忆和认知障碍的看法及其来源很有价值，因为古铁雷斯引用了许多古典、中世纪和当代的学者和医生。这本书用拉丁语写成，完全从生理学和医学的角度探讨记忆，有关于记忆丧失分类的章节，对其原因的描述（包括老年，这在以前并不被广泛认识），以及几章关于其预防和治疗，非常强调，或，一种鼻内混合物，由“标记坚果”制成，即树的果实（也称为马六甲豆），具有增强记忆的特性。我们回顾了古铁雷斯的著作，将其置于当时欧洲更广泛的知识和社会背景下，并讨论了的相关性和据称的神经药理学作用。
