MEDINA, JOSE TORIBIO (1852-1930), scholar, author and bibliographer, was born in Santiago de Chile on Oct. 21, 1852. After an excellent education, he received his degree of advocate at the university in Santiago in 1873, but such time as he could spare from the practice of his profession he consistently gave to literature and the study of American history. In 1875 he was appointed first secretary of legation in Lima, went to the United States in the following year and spent the next two years travelling in the United States and Europe, where he made a careful study of documents relating to the history of Chile. Shortly after his return to Chile he made a dangerous journey into Araucania in 1879 to gather materials for a work on Los Aborigenes de Chile, to be the first volume of a complete history of Chile which he had projected. In 1881, upon the conclusion of the War of the Pacific, in which he served as auditor of the reserves in Tarapaca, he went to Spain as first secretary of the newly established legation in Madrid where he was able to make extensive researches into the archives of the Indies in Seville and Simancas. When he re
turned to Chile in 1886 he set up his own printing press, from which and its successors he sent out a great number of books. In addition to his own works, Medina has edited numerous others relating to the whole range of discovery, exploration, history and geography in all the Americas, particularly Chile.
His labours in the entire field of Hispanic-American bibliography have been stupendous, a list of his works would exceed 30o titles, among them: Historia de la literature colonial en Chile (1878) ; Biblioteca americana (1888) ; Coleccion de documentos (3o vol. 1888) ; Historiadores de Chile (33 vol.) ; Biblioteca hispano-americana (1898 1907) ; Los Tribunales del Santo Oficio en America; La imprenta en Rio de la Plata (1892), en Santiago de Chile (1891), en Lima (1904 07), en Mexico (1907-12) ; La Araucana (Iwo), a monumental edition in five folio volumes unlikely ever to be superseded; El descubrimiento del Oceano Pacifico (1920) ; Cervantes en las letras chilenas (1923).
See W. B. Parker, Chileans of To-Day (Santiago de Chile, 1920).
(W. B. P.)