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Concept
Juan de Cuéllar
Summary
Juan José Ruperto de Cuéllar y Villanueba (ca. 1739, probably Real Sitio de Aranjuez, Spain – 1801, Ilocos, Philippines) was a Spanish pharmacologist and botanist. From 1786 to 1797 he was the leader of a royal botanical expedition to the Philippines.
According to his biographer María Belén Bañas Llanos, Juan de Cuéllar was born in Aranjuez into a family employed in the care of plants in the royal gardens. His parents also ran a pharmacy. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried, to a man the king had named regent of the pharmacy. When his mother also died (in 1760), he sold the olive groves that constituted his inheritance and moved to Madrid.
In December 1760 he bought a pharmacy on Atocha Street in Madrid, and entered the Royal College of Pharmacists. After completing the course, he continued his association with the College in various important capacities – first secretary, general solicitor, fiscal, and second secretary, at different times. Around 1781 he was forced to give up his pharmacy for financial reasons.
In 1783 and 1784 he attended classes at the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, in a program to impart scientific knowledge to pharmacists. In a letter dated December 17, 1784, Cuéllar wrote to Cristóbal Nieto de Piña, vice president of the Royal Medical Society of Seville, that he was compiling a herbarium based on the system of Carl Linnaeus and asking for Nieto's recommendation to fill the vacant position of botanist in Seville. The Royal Medical Society of Seville gave him the appointment on May 2, 1785, but he was unable to accept immediately because he had also been named royal commissioner in Cádiz.
The El Peruano had arrived in Cádiz on February 21, 1785, carrying part of the scientific material sent back from Peru and Chile by the royal expedition under Hipólito Ruiz and José Antonio Pavón. Also arriving on the El Peruano was Joseph Dombey, a Frenchman who had served as second botanist on the Ruiz and Pavón expedition. Cuéllar was to catalogue and sort the material and prepare it for transfer to the Casa de Contratación.
Official source
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