The American physician : or, a treatise of the roots, plants, trees, shrubs, fruit, herbs, etc., growing in the English Plantations in America ; ... whereunto is added a discourse of the Cacao-nut-Tree, and the use of its fruit ; with all the ways of making Chocolate

The earliest work in English on the medicinal virtues of North American tropical plants. Based on first-hand observations made in the West Indies, Evidence suggests that Hughes began his career in 1651 with a privateering voyage to the West Indies, during which he traveled to Barbados, St. Kitts, Cuba, Jamaica and mainland Florida. He appears to have spent a good deal of time visiting British plantations on Jamaica and Barbados, where he observed and made descriptions of a large number of New World tropical plants including potatoes, yams, maize (“the wheat of America”), bananas, avocadoes (“Spanish pears”), chili peppers, watermelons, sugarcane, guavas, prickly pears, coconuts and manioc. Hughes’s work “contributed greatly to the spread of the American indigenous use of plants ‘either for Meat or Medicine’” (Wilson & Hurst, Chocolate as medicine [2012] p. 55). Digital facsimile from Google Books at this link.