Literature on the circulation of natural knowledge in the Atlantic world offers rich discussions regarding the significance of non-European peoples in the development of colonial and metropolitan science and medicine. The Americas has been a foundational geography in this scholarship. Historians have shown the intense epistemological struggles that ensued between Amerindians, Africans, creoles, and Europeans who lived, labored, and died together. However, one region that was pivotal in Atlantic knowledge networks remains largely absent — West Africa. This paper illustrates how the West African slave trading zones functioned as unique spaces in Atlantic itineraries of science and medicine. Frequently crumbling fortresses like Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast were transient, biocontact zones laced with violence, dehumanization, and disease. There were few long-term European residents; professional naturalists made only rare appearances; and bare-life existence often subsumed all else. As such, I argue that gathering natural knowledge was characterized by an eclectic empiricism that had limited institutional support and scarce resources. Using fragmentary evidence culled from travel narratives, correspondence, and merchants accounting records, I argue that slave traders often functioned as scientific scavengers, seeking to consume West African natural knowledge wherever such might exist – whether in the malnourished bodies of enslaved people who had been trafficked hundreds of miles, or among enslaved boys who grew physic gardens at slave factories. This paper problematizes early modern science and medicine by examining knowledge-making in a profoundly broken West African world.

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.

My paper is set in the Southern Pacific, or the part of the ocean that connected East Asia to Central and South America, from the late-sixteenth to the early-eighteenth century. With merchant vessels loaded with American silver, African slaves, and global luxury goods circulating throughout the region, it was one of the most active commercial zones in the world. And for Spain's European rivals, it was an attractive target for incursions. Yet among the European pirates and privateers making their way into the region, satisfying hunger was a surprisingly difficult - and distracting - part of their experience at sea. With little knowledge of their own about what was safe to eat, they had to rely on outsiders to help them gain access to food. This group primarily consisted of black men and women taken captive during raids of slave ships, merchant vessels, and Spanish-American port cities, who possessed the local and scientific ability to determine which parts of which plants, fruits, and animals could be eaten or even treat diseases. In drawing upon the accounts of those Europeans, my paper centers the intellectual labor of African-descent men and women, highlighting the ways they deployed their knowledge in service to their captors, often against their will but also as a means to secure their freedom. It also considers the risks involved in such efforts, given the possibility of making mistakes that could endanger the health of their captors and in turn put their own lives in further danger.

This paper studies the development of novel ideas about the human body that appeared in Atlantic slave-trading circuits during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Using governmental, corporate, and private records from archives in Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, The United States, Brazil, Colombia and Cuba, the paper explores the emergence in Atlantic slave-trading societies of a new epistemology that conceived of fungible and universal bodies whose parts were measurable and comparable, as the diseases that affected them, in quantifiable and reproducible ways on the basis of normalized, constant, standards. I argue that these ideas about bodies, which scholars traditionally identify as related to the rise of the New Science and political and medical arithmetics in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century English, French and northern European learned circles, first emerged in sixteenth and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies. These transformations came about as a consequence of slave trading communities’ need for the quantification of the risks involved in trading and investing in human corporeality and its afflictions in a vast Atlantic network of increasingly complex, commercial, technical, political and legal dimensions. As a result, human bodies’ characteristics (height, gender, age, weight, among others), and diseases became quantifiable and normalized as groupable and predictable within a new language of commerce, and appraisal of the flesh. The history of the African slave body, thus, travels (and precedes by several decades) the same paths followed by the history of the quantifiable and universal bodies of public health, epidemiology, and biomedicine.

This paper explores the entanglement of slavery, medicine and natural inquiry in early modern Italy. It focuses on the healing spaces and practices that developed alongside the creation of a Bagno, a purpose built edifice that housed a large community of up to 3,000 (mostly Ottoman) slaves in the Tuscan port city of Livorno. In the early modern period, the presence of slaves in the Italian peninsula was largely related to the struggle between Ottoman and European powers for the control of Mediterranean territories. In recent years, scholars have started to shed light on the role of slavery in the economic and political strategies of early modern Italian states. However, little is known about the health-related practices and the processes of knowledge-making that were incidental to the presence of enslaved communities in the Italian territories. This paper explores how such practices and processes participated in shaping the early modern world of healing and medical and natural knowledge. On the one hand, it considers how physicians and natural inquirers were involved in maintaining and supporting the institution of slavery and relied on enslaved bodies to construct knowledge, authority, and reputation. On the other hand, it examines how Ottoman captives acted themselves as healers who provided for different constituencies, including the residents of the cities in which they were held in captivity. By interrogating the health and knowledge practices associated with the Bagno in Livorno, this paper will shed new light on the forms of encounter and conflict informing early modern healthscapes.