Overview

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.

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9781469630878

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Reviews

With tantalizing images and oft-times minute personal detail, The Experiential Caribbean opens up an unexplored chapter of the history of the region over the course of the long seventeenth century.--Bulletin of Spanish Studies Intriguing . . . . The Experiential Caribbean has provided a blueprint on how to reconstruct narratives of healing from places and spaces that have been misread and invisibilized.--H-Net Reviews Restores black ritual practitioners, and the improvisational epistemes they enacted throughout the Caribbean basin, to our understanding of the early modern Atlantic world, thereby productively defamiliarizing our histories of science, medicine, and Atlantic exchange.--Nuncius Reading Pablo F. Gomez's The Experiential Caribbean is a bit like stepping into a parallel universe, one where the 'long seventeenth century' (circa 1580 to 1720) gave rise to medical empiricism not just in Gideon Harvey's and Thomas Sydenham's London, Marcello Malpighi's and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli's Pisa, Nicolas Malebranche's Paris, or Rene Descartes's Amsterdam but in places like Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Portobelo, and Caracas.--Hispanic American Historical Review The 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 Literature Gomez's work makes a timely and valuable contribution.--The Journal of American History A fascinating overview of medical practices from the perspective of ritual practitioners of African descent in the Caribbean in the long seventeenth century.--Isis An 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 Review Gomez'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 Quarterly An indispensable contribution to the literature on the lived experiences and healing cultures of the early modern Atlantic.--Social History of Medicine A sweeping, ambitious, and provocative analysis of the various practices and beliefs black ritual specialists and healers in the Caribbean employed under Spanish colonial rule.--Manguinhos With 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 Medicine This 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 Medicine The 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 History Gomez explores the relationship between localized knowledge creation and the practice of health and healing in the early modern Atlantic. Recommended.--Choice

An indispensable contribution to the literature on the lived experiences and healing cultures of the early modern Atlantic.--Social History of Medicine A sweeping, ambitious, and provocative analysis of the various practices and beliefs black ritual specialists and healers in the Caribbean employed under Spanish colonial rule.--Manguinhos With 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 Medicine This 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 Medicine The 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 History Gomez explores the relationship between localized knowledge creation and the practice of health and healing in the early modern Atlantic. Recommended.--Choice

A sweeping, ambitious, and provocative analysis of the various practices and beliefs black ritual specialists and healers in the Caribbean employed under Spanish colonial rule.--Manguinhos With 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 Medicine This 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 Medicine The 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 History Gomez explores the relationship between localized knowledge creation and the practice of health and healing in the early modern Atlantic. Recommended.--Choice

Gomez explores the relationship between localized knowledge creation and the practice of health and healing in the early modern Atlantic. Recommended.--Choice

Author Information

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.

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