The African Diaspora and the History of Medicine in the Longue Durée

Name: The African Diaspora and the History of Medicine in the Longue Durée | The Huntington
Start: Sat, Nov 16 2024
Location: The Huntington

Event

Pablo Gómez, associate professor of history and the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, examines how the African diaspora and the transatlantic slave trade shaped medical practice and ideas about the human body in the early modern Atlantic World.

Lectures

People of African descent produced some of the region’s dominant healing systems during the 17th and 18th centuries. At the same time, the ideas and practices of South Atlantic slave traders were essential for the appearance of the fundamental notions behind the rise of biomedicine, public health, and political economy.

Sponsored by the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine.

Painting of a man kneeling with outstretched arms toward an item on a beach with a lion looking on.

A Spiritual Practitioner and His Paraphernalia, 1650s–1660s. From Ezio Bassani, ed., Un Cappuccino nell’Africa nera del seicento (1987), plate 33. CC BY-NC 4.0.

About the Speaker

Pablo Gómez, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of history and the history of medicine, University of Wisconsin–Madison, focuses his work on the history of knowledge, science, and the history of health and corporeality in Latin America, the Caribbean, the African diaspora, and, more generally, the Iberian and Black Atlantic Worlds.

His book The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (winner of the William H. Welch Medal, the Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize, and an Honorable Mention Bolton-Johnson Book Prize) explores belief-making and the creation of evidence around the human body and the natural world in the early modern Caribbean.

His recently published edited volume, The Gray Zones of Medicine, examines the role of unlicensed health practitioners in the shaping of Latin American history from the colonial time to the present.

He is currently working on a history of the quantifiable body and the development of novel ideas about risk, labor, and disease that appeared in Atlantic slave markets during the 17th century.

Gómez leads a project on a reframing of global histories of science, medicine, and technology, and is actively involved in projects of digital archival preservation in Colombia, Cuba, and Brazil.