University of North Carolina Press The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

Review A fascinating overview of medical practices from the perspective of ritual practitioners of African descent in the Caribbean in the long seventeenth century.--IsisAn exciting contribution to a wide array of scholarly fields, including but not limited to the history of Atlantic science and medicine, the black diaspora, and early modern Latin America and the Caribbean.--American Historical ReviewGomez's archival dexterity is on full display as he charts the development of the intellectual culture of black healers and its movement across the Spanish Caribbean.--William and Mary QuarterlyThe people and places come alive on the page, and we get detailed information about how the practice of medicine came to be and operated.--Early American LiteratureAn indispensable contribution to the literature on the lived experiences and healing cultures of the early modern Atlantic.--Social History of MedicineA sweeping, ambitious, and provocative analysis of the various practices and beliefs black ritual specialists and healers in the Caribbean employed under Spanish colonial rule.--ManguinhosThe book's conceptual breadth and imagination make it a valuable contribution to literatures ranging from Atlantic slavery to science studies and the history of medicine.--Medical HistoryThis is a fascinating and challenging book that will reward readers in a variety of fields, including the history of early modern science and medicine, but also those interested in the broader social and intellectual history of the Caribbean and Atlantic world.--Early Science and MedicineWith a sharp eye for epistemic difference, deep knowledge of medical science (Gomez has an M.D.), and an engaging style, Gomez demonstrates that the scientific revolution took place in the margins of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, in the hands and minds of people of African descent.--Bulletin of the History of MedicineGomez explores the relationship between localized knowledge creation and the practice of health and healing in the early modern Atlantic. Recommended.--Choice Product Description Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gomez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gomez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine.Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gomez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world. About the Author Pablo F. Gomez is assistant professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.