Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures by Kelly Wisecup (review)

Understanding the complexity of cross-cultural communication and information networks in the colonial Atlantic world has provided a rewarding challenge for literary and historical scholars in recent years. Kelly Wisecup’s first book, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures, usefully contributes to this scholarship by considering cross-cultural exchanges concerning disease and medicine between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Wisecup’s book anchors medical knowledge and discourse more firmly within the field of Atlantic colonialism while simultaneously offering a more complex way of understanding how cross-cultural exchanges defined the natural world.

Specifically, Wisecup situates her analysis in the circulation of medical information between Europe, the Caribbean, and the American colonies while also “shifting the focus . . . to consider colonists’ reports of medicine and illness in the context of Native American and African, as well as colonial, medical knowledge” (6–7). Chapter by chapter, Wisecup deftly describes cultural contact zones where the epidemiology of many New World diseases was nearly impossible to trace and where European medical knowledge was, at best, unstable, often relying on hearsay and supposition as much as observation or experimentation. The medical discourse used in these zones offers a rich terrain for considering the uneven exchange of knowledge concerning race, identity, and belonging. Encountering the terrifying unknown, colonists, Natives, and Africans alike worked in sometimes awkward fashion to palliate, identify, and contain outbreaks of diseases like cholera and smallpox that threatened not only their individual lives but their collective social world as well.

While European-authored texts make up the vast majority of documentation available to us, Wisecup argues that we should not understand these texts as monolithic documents capable only of reflecting European dominance over the New World and its peoples. Wisecup’s framework explores the “textural” complexity of these documents, generated out of the “spoken and performative exchanges of medical knowledge” between Native Americans and Africans, European colonists, and whites in the metropole (32). Wisecup employs what could be described as a “bottom-up” approach, situating these exchanges across texts as participating in an unstable colonial information culture. She argues that European colonists’ anxieties about how to understand and incorporate medical knowledge gained from Native and African sources led these writers to develop rhetorical strategies aimed at erasing these traces, thereby producing a culture of European dominance. However, as Wisecup convincingly demonstrates, the “formal irregularities” apparent in these works also “indicate the ways in which experiences of cross-cultural encounter were incorporated into the rhetorical strategies of colonial texts” (32). To put it another way, the loose seams in the texts examined here reveal the intersections, exchanges, and pathways through which medical knowledge in the colonial world developed and circulated.

Similar seams are also visible in the colonists’ theories about “their bodies and identities in relation to the American climate and to the other people who shared that same environment,” Wisecup argues (32). Stuck between their own national and racial identifications and their creole status, colonial writers worked to articulate European knowledge through privileged frameworks to assert European dominance—yet they also negotiated metropolitan natural philosophies that questioned the stability of “whiteness” in New World environments. Such tensions provide another valuable loose thread that Medical Encounters pulls on to unravel a series of complex rhetorical, textual, and cultural negotiations.

Wisecup’s initial intervention reconsiders what early colonial medical texts can offer in terms of the cross-cultural contributions that make them up. She begins her first chapter engaging well-known critical accounts by Stephen Greenblatt and Joyce Chaplain concerning the “invisible bullets” theory of disease described in Thomas Harriot’s 1588 A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Wisecup argues that whereas both Greenblatt and Chaplain interpret Harriot’s description specifically within the context of “European religious and scientific debates,” the Report is best understood within the “crosscultural contexts in which [it] was produced” (38). She cites multiple sources suggesting that by the...