ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the copaiba balsam and the history of its scientific description. It identifies the earliest reports on this herbal product in Brazil and traces the attempts to describe the plant species that yield the copaiba balsam, its uses, and extraction method. By exploring accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as contemporaneous pharmacopeia, the authors show the confusion that arose in the taxonomy, uses, and names for this plant, thereby highlighting how the careful study of original historical documents, such as the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae and the images preserved in the collection Libri Picturati at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, can greatly assist in the identification of plants and thus solidify the usefulness of such colonial natural histories for present-day botanists. Finally, the chapter links the wound-healing oil described in the HNB to two specific species of Copaifera.
