The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

by Pablo F. Gómez

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.

Genres: History, Science, Research

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 17, 2017

Reviews

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for HIST 3175 - Honestly, I was really bored reading this. It probably had to do with that it primarily focused on the acquisition of science and knowledge, which to me is just not that interesting. Gomez was a doctor prior to being a historian, so I guess it makes sense that he focused more on how healers, apothecaries, and physicians worked and intersected, while the Inquisition and witches were secondary actors. I just think for a class on the Inquisition I would have liked a book that focused a lot more on that and the trials, because I am still left wondering things about the people that were prosecuted for practicing herbalism and things like that.

[Harrison Helms · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly thought-provoking, but very challenging to make heads and tails of.

[Erin]

s'24
201E - final project

exams - medicine

[Vandani]

read for uni - introduction