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Gómez Pablo F. , The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press , 2017), pp.ￂ xxii+314, $85.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4696-3086-1.
Book Review
Over the last two decades, medicine, health and healing have become increasingly prominent subjects in histories of the Atlantic world. The result has been a proliferation of new approaches. Some studies have grown from the tradition of Atlantic environmental history, influentially pioneered by Alfred Crosby, and link environmental and epidemiological shifts to the expansion of European settlement. Teams of historians and paleopathologists have capitalised on the emerging body of DNA evidence to chart with new precision the ever-shifting disease ecologies of the pre- and post-Columbian Americas. Histories of Atlantic slavery have drawn increasing attention to the cultural and intellectual dynamism of healers of African and Native American ancestry who, it now seems, were the healers of first resort for most colonial inhabitants. Studies of the relationship between science and empire have explored the colonial bioprospecting campaigns that emerged in part to deal with the new epidemiological realities. Some in this vein have gone further, arguing that such prospecting - at once biological and commercial, and underwritten by the evidence of the senses rather than the authority of ancient texts - propelled a European scientific revolution.
In The Experiential Caribbean, Pablo Gómez takes up these multiple Atlantic histories of health, medicine and epistemological transformation. The result is a highly original cross-disciplinary contribution. Gómez's main argument is that over the course of the long seventeenth century, as a scientific revolution is supposed to have unfolded in London and Paris, black ritual healers in the Caribbean were leading an epistemological revolution of their own. Much like European virtuosi, the work of black ritual healers in places like Havana and Cartagena installed the evidence of the senses as the foundation for truth claims about the inner working of the natural world. How things...