Healing Waters of the Caribbean: Affliction and Hope in Creole Discourses on Water Cures

Historians have debated the ways in which Old World cultures were transformed, merged, and informed one another in colonial spaces like the Caribbean. My research shows that healing rituals using water were part of creolized discourses that bridged physical and spiritual worlds. This paper uses both medical treatises from the eighteenth century and Africanist scholarship to argue that elemental substances like water served as loci for intercultural dialogue. Indeed, water cures were often recommended for the most stubborn of ailments, allowing popular beliefs in water's miraculous powers to flourish. Many corrosive skin ailments were linked to spiritual and humoral imbalances. European theories about water cures began to center on the idea of transpiration, the body’s permeability and its ability to take in healthful substances that could "relax" the sensible fibers of the body or correct humoral imbalances—afflictions that were themselves often-times caused by the environmental and emotional challenges of life in “the tropics.” They wrote about the power of natural springs such as the one in Bath in eastern Jamaica (named after the spa town in England) or the hot springs of volcanic islands like Guadeloupe. Yet some of the most powerful medicinal springs were discovered by maroons or enslaved healers who passed along that knowledge to Europeans. To convince afflicted persons to try a new cure, healers had to explain the power in ways that reflected local communities' shared fascination with the power of healing waters.