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

On one hand, José R. Jouve Martín’s newest book, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru (2014), signals a departure from his first effort, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650-1700) (2009). The earlier title focused on seventeenth-century Lima and how persons of varying degrees of sub-Saharan African ancestry, free or enslaved, navigated that bureaucratic and literary maze of social control and representation limned by Angel Rama in La ciudad letrada. The present monograph, in contrast, brings to the forefront health policy, medicine, and the “limits of racial domination” (to borrow Douglas Cope’s felicitous phrase) during the long eighteenth century, when late-viceregal institutions ostensibly gave way to republican ones. On the other hand, there is an intellectual and methodological consistency that situates Jouve Martín’s two books within a personal and collective trajectory of anti-racist scholarship and pedagogy. As a result, both books are essential titles for scholars and teachers interested in understanding racial formations in Peru, and in how Afro-Peruvians negotiated and resisted racial, caste, and legal hierarchies from the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century.

The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima imparts to readers the life stories of a handful of mulatto, pardo, and black physicians from Lima: José Manuel Valdés, José Manuel Dávalos, and José Pastor Larrinaga. It is the first book-length study devoted to such physicians in any one city of colonial and early republican Latin America. As such, its scope and its intentions are both daring and original, and the Introduction clearly presents to readers the novelty of the subject matter as well as the organization of the volume’s materials and themes. Although I could not possibly do justice to Jouve Martín’s slim volume within the span of this review, I shall try to communicate its ambitions and its achievements.

As a historian of science, I was surprised by the many ways in which Afro-Peruvian physicians transcended their medical profession and entered the public sphere and the literary establishment during the early nineteenth century. This was made possible because certain government and university officials, reaffirming the informal policy known as Obedezco, pero no cumplo, elected to not maintain all of the barriers erected by institutional racism. As a result, a handful of mulatto, pardo, and black physicians not only were aware of key scientific achievements of the Enlightenment but also contributed to the same in Peru, their writings finding publishers as far away as Madrid, Granada, and Montpellier. Moreover, they associated with powerful Crown figures in the sciences and they had a voice in public health policy matters and debates in Peru. The advancement of the sciences during the long eighteenth century was of course predicated on the alliance of literati and government (Church and Crown officials alike), as many previous scholars have demonstrated.

By a closely watched barometer of Enlightenment values, the three Afro-Peruvian physicians appear to have conformed completely to the dominant culture. “Like many of his contemporaries,” Jouve Martín concludes, “Valdés rejected the existence of a rift between the two [spheres, medicine and religion]. He saw them as inextricably linked. The church had strongly influenced the practice of medicine in Peru since early colonial times, and it continued to do so, well into the nineteenth century” (Black Doctors 128). Here the outsized critical literature on the Catholic Enlightenment would have been helpful to Jouve Martín’s argument as well as to his readers’ understanding of early modern and modern Spanish and Latin American science.

Valdés, as the author of the current study reveals, rose to the position of surgeon general (protomedicato general) of the Republic in 1835, under President Felipe Salaverry. He also was a tenured professor...