Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures

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The conquest and colonization of the Americas resulted in all kinds of exchanges , including the transmission of diseases and the sharing of medicines to treat them. Kelly Wisecup examines how European settlers, Native Americans, and New World Africans communicated medical knowledge in early America, and how the colonists represented what they learned in their literatures. Through illuminating readings of a wide range of colonial texts, Wisecup demonstrates that all of these groups held certain medical ideas in common, including a conception of disease as both a spiritual and a physical entity, and a belief in the power of special rituals or prayers to restore health. As a consequence, medical knowledge and practices operated as a shared form of communication on which everyone drew in order to adapt to a world of devastating new maladies and unfamiliar cures. By signaling one’s relation to supernatural forces, to the natural world, and to other people, medicine became an effective means of communicating a variety of messages about power and identity as well as bodies and minds. “An interesting, informative, and important book. Medical Encounters provides a new lens through which we can see moments of cultural encounter as rich with information about Native, African, and European beliefs and experiences.” —Kristina Bross, author of Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America KElly WisEcup is assistant professor of English at the university of North Texas. cover art: John White, An Indian Conjuror, ca. 1585, watercolor and bodycolor, an iconic image of first contact between Europeans and American indians, 26.3 x 15 cm,© The Trustees of British Museum. cover design by sally Nichols uNiVERsiTy OF MAssAcHusETTs pREss Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress ...