The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic by Pablo F. Gómez (review)

While recent historiographical trends have unseated Europe as the sole center of scientific knowledge in the early modern Atlantic world by flagging the contributions of creole intellectuals in New Spain and Peru, for example, these studies have largely assumed that all locations produced the same New Science. In his monograph, Pablo Gómez counters that a variety of experiential knowledges competed in a dense marketplace of ideas, and uses the seventeenth-century Caribbean, populated mainly by people of African descent, to examine the emergence of an experiential consensus—modern science—out of their medical and healing practices.

Gómez’s source base is drawn from seventeenth-century inquisitorial records naming over one hundred practitioners or Mohanes (the Amerindian term he prefers), predominantly in Cartagena de Indias, Havana, and parts of Panamá. While the cases single out criminalized behaviors, he demonstrates that these men and women were representative of deeply integrated healing practices. He argues for the cosmopolitanism of this Caribbean, populated by individuals of varied origins who moved constantly between places that were themselves always shifting within imperial frameworks. This resulted in a society where differential knowledges were easily shared despite political infrastructures (such as the Inquisition) intended to promote orthodoxy.

This environment produced a competitive market wherein practitioners needed an adaptive praxis that produced a comprehensive set of ideas about the body, and public consumption of those ideas determined a healer’s success. The book’s seven short chapters take the reader through the landscape, populated by mobile bodies and ideas, and into the realms of epidemic disease, sensorial knowledge, Caribbean pharmacopeias, and the inexplicable and wondrous. In the end, Gómez shows that black ritual specialists drew upon sensorial experiences in order to claim access to truths about the world, and that those truths were fleeting rather than expressing continuities with places of origin in Africa, Europe, or the indigenous Americas. Refusing tired arguments for either continuities or hybridities between old and new worlds, Gómez foregrounds ephemeral and unintelligible knowledges in the meetings between his heterogeneous subjects.

In addition to identifying these intersecting paths throughout the Caribbean, Gómez uncovers new common ground between traditions, emerging from the convergence of similar practices. While historians often claim that obsession with the exotic and dangerous led Europeans to engage non-European ritual practitioners, Gómez shows otherwise. West African Bissau and Bran healers sacrificed oxen for protection against disease; French peasants applied the skin of newly killed sheep to sick bodies to cure them. In 1627, the archbishop of the New Kingdom of Granada was not healed by his physicians, and turned to Mohanes who wrapped his arm in the body of a freshly killed bull. The archbishop and the healers might have told different narratives about the metaphysics of this practice, but they shared a belief in the power of the bull’s body to heal the man’s arm. And if the cure worked, so might the narratives converge, even temporarily.

Juicy anecdotes about unlikely healers buttress Gómez’s argument. The former-slave-turned-master Diego López, born in Cartagena and employed in the city’s San Sebastian hospital, became a licensed surgeon with a successful practice treating Caribbean patients of all backgrounds. He drew upon Galenic texts from his library as well as practices derived from indigenous and African medicines. Imprisoned by the Inquisition in 1640, he denounced a Portuguese competitor (who purchased infirm slaves cheaply, cured some of them, and resold them at a profit) as a crypto-Jew, and other fellow surgeons as blasphemers and witches. He ended his career as an expert witness and medical practitioner for the Inquisition. Among those he accused was Paula de Eguiluz, a former slave and renowned healer in Cartagena who freely traveled to attend to the bishop for multiple ailments, along with...