A traditional narrative in early modern history speaks of the transition toward empirical epistemologies from those reliant on authoritative writers, such as Aristotle and Galen. Scholars examining this formation of knowledge based on experience have tended to focus on educated elites at the expense of other contributors. European expansion changed the parameters and the material pathways of this incipient empiricism as seen most notably in the Colombian Exchange. In the years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492, plants, animals, foodstuffs, and diseases from the Americas and Europe travelled across the Atlantic and became integrated within both continents. The Caribbean was thus a key locus for this historical development, which itself had received scant attention, at least in English, until the publication of Pablo Gómez's Experiential Caribbean. This landmark monograph challenges the long-standing interpretations of early modern epistemology while situating these developments in the Caribbean, the first contact zone in the Hispanic world in need of scholarly analysis.
Gómez's study proffers the reader invaluable interventions through his problematizing of medical practitioners, whom he referred to as “ritual specialists, ritual practitioners, and health specialists” (12). Instead of physicians and surgeons, who have predominated scholarly discussion, Gómez inserts apothecaries, midwives, and other healers into the process of knowledge generation and its relation to medicine. In addition to his inclusion of these overlooked practitioners, he focuses on those of African descent (61–64) and their central role in this nascent empirical culture, a demographic ignored by researchers in the field. Another vital contribution is the examination of the supernatural components of healing, wherein spiritual and invisible forces were said to have tangible effects on the natural world, including Caribbean bodies regardless of European, American, or African extraction. Ritual practitioners had to harness and contend with these otherworldly components. Gómez convincingly illustrates how the supernatural and natural worlds got interpreted through the aid of sensory data. The author thus should be lauded for breaking of new ground in the history of medicine, Spanish overseas expansion, and the place of persons of African descent within the early modern Caribbean.
The seven chapters of the Experiential Caribbean are arranged thematically starting with an overview of the seventeenth century Caribbean. The next chapter, one of the best in this significant monograph, conveys how contagion was understood in this geographical context along with its responses in the form of healing spaces and the curative strategies of medical practitioners. Chapter 3 homes in on the world of ritual practitioners of African ancestry in the Caribbean and their use of localized and sensory-based interpretation of natural phenomena and the remedies of unhealthy bodies. The following chapter takes a step back to look at the practice of epistemology in the Spanish Atlantic before delving in chapter 5 into the role of material culture among ritual practitioners as seen in inventories of medicines, which Gómez described as “social pharmacopeias”. Chapter 6 then proceeds to examine the role of non-natural events in the development of experiential knowledge among these ritual specialists. This chapter, another of this book's stellar moments, provides a unique perspective on the place of marvels, wonders, and miracles—events said to violate the order of nature—and how peoples of the Americas interpreted these occurrences. The seventh and final chapter is the coalescence of these seemingly disparate threads, wherein Gómez analyses the development of expertise, one born from subjective sense data, among the healers of African ancestry in contrast to the long-standing reliance on authoritative thinkers. While understanding the latter as dogma is overly simplistic, the transition was revolutionary and was the culmination of this epistemological development in the realm of healing in the Caribbean. The ability of the author to navigate and organize such diverse content into a readable and coherent argument ought to provide scholars a methodological benchmark to emulate. Moreover, Gómez took great pains to explain concepts, such as “New Science” and “materia medica”, for readers who are not historians of science and medicine, which, indelibly, amplifies his contribution to the discipline.
Despite the book's exceptionality, issues are present. As is common in books organized thematically, the reader loses a sense of historical change and continuity chronologically. A useful strategy might be to use the conclusion to summarize these processes, which would feed into the author's discussion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapters veered, at times, toward becoming episodic, something born of the plentiful archival evidence gathered by the author from American and European collections. There were moments when an example gets introduced, but its relevance to the discussion was not always made clear. A final complaint involves the use of early modern representations (149 and 177) in a cursory manner, which represents a missed opportunity to incorporate visual evidence. Instead, the images are little more than period-specific window-dressing.
These comments, however, do little to minimize the innovation and analytical prowess found in the Experiential Caribbean, which ought to be compulsory reading for historians of early modern medicine and colonial Latin America as well as scholars of the Atlantic world. Gómez, through a thoughtful and sustained examination of ritual specialists of African descent in the Caribbean, challenged long-held understandings of the development of empiricism. Moreover, he incorporated and discussed the otherworldly dimensions of these ideas of healing meaningfully. Thanks to Gómez, readers can learn about historical actors overlooked due to their race and their domain(s) of medical practice, while at the same time situating them within immense epistemological changes occurring during the long seventeenth century.
