Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

Pablo F. Gómez, Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic Pablo F. Gómez , , Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2017 . Pp. 314. $29.95. ISBN 978 1 4696 3087 8. Paul F Ramírez Social History of Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 3, 1 August 2018, Pages 648–649, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky042 Published: 03 June 2018 Cite Permissions Share [Privacy Badger has replaced this AddThis button.] Among the healers featured in this study of Caribbean healing over the seventeenth century (ca. 1580–1720) is Antonio Congo, an African-born slave who lived in Spain, New Spain, Santo Domingo and Curaçao before settling in Cartagena de Indias. A free healer, Congo referred to herbs and other products of the natural world as his ‘offspring’; cast coins received in payment on the floor of his shack to appease the spirits of the Amerindians interred underneath; and communed with nature, witnessed by a crowd commanding a tropical storm into submission sometime around 1680. For this he was denounced to the Inquisition’s office in Cartagena and his experiences entered...