The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru by José R. Jouve Martín (review)

This lively monograph examines the changing medical profession in late colonial Lima through its most unlikely practitioners, the black and mulatto surgeons and doctors who dominated and transformed the field. Unlike most Afro-descent people in colonial Lima, these men left a documentary corpus, both scholarly and personal. This study of three of these black doctors investigates the intersection of medicine with political and institutional changes in late colonial Lima.

The first chapter attributes the rise of black healers to colonial demography: nearly half of Lima’s population was of African descent. Men of Spanish descent chose higher status jobs, leaving the roles of phlebotomist, romance surgeon, midwife, and nurse to free blacks. Only Latin surgeons required university training and an examination before licensing by the Protomedicato (the official tribunal overseeing the medical profession); these posts often went unfilled. By 1701 castas were also attending medical classes; despite professors’ complaints, the king allowed anyone without “infamy” (illegitimacy or heresy) to apply. In 1752, another monarch reversed this position by extending “infamy” to indigenous or African heritage. Only a few castas succeeded in gaining licenses by petitioning the monarch or obtaining training outside the empire.

Chapter 2 describes how two of these Afro-Peruvian surgeons intersected with Lima’s enlightenment journal, the Mercurio peruano (1791–95). Invited to write for it by Hipólito Unanue, the great creole scientific reformer, José Manuel Valdés and José Pastor Larrinaga wrote on new surgical procedures and theories, and railed against the arcane remedies of the city’s unlicensed curers. In pseudonymous pieces, they intervened in debates over gender, reproduction, and monstrosity, and even the patriotic history of Peru, linked in creole fashion to Inca (but not African) heritage.

Chapter 3 examines the different career paths of these two as well as José Manuel Dávalos, whose degree from Montpellier led to a career as an accredited doctor and a university chair in Lima. Early nineteenth-century Lima faced not only filth and epidemic disease, but also political rifts as the viceroyalties moved toward independence. Dávalos played a large role in the 1806 smallpox vaccination campaign, and he and Valdés occupied chairs in Unanue’s new Colegio de Medicina y Cirugía de San Fernando, which would become a center for new medical practice and radical politics. Larrinaga, on the other hand, sought to separate the mostly black surgeons from the Protomedicato and mostly white doctors that supervised them. He accomplished this in 1801, proposing a surgical school for the certification of surgeons in direct competition with Unanue’s San Fernando.

Most of the black doctors’ writings concerned contemporary medical and public health questions. Yet they were also drawn into debates over slavery, race, and citizenship as the viceroyalties participated in the political tumult of the Cortes de Cádiz as Napoleon invaded Spain. The existence of Afro-Peruvian intellectuals led to an 1812 Corte decision that castas could practice any profession for which they were qualified, though voting rights were left ambiguous. The reforms were suspended when the monarchy returned in 1814. But with independence in 1821, black doctors received government posts, including Valdés’s triumphant appointment as protomédico general.

Chapter 4 looks at Valdés’s career as protomédico (1835–43), wherein he pushed for a Peruvian medical practice, based upon the specificities of the Andean climate, and confronted folk healers and foreign physicians. His campaign against a French purgative cure met with public success and resulted in an important epidemiological treatise, but the arrest and failed trial of a popular curandera degraded the Protomedicato’s support. The office found itself mired in national and international politics as it promoted a Peruvian medicine.

The conclusion examines Valdés’s biography of Martín de Porres as the sixteenth...