The Medicines Trade in the Portuguese Atlantic World: Acquisition and Dissemination of Healing Knowledge from Brazil (c. 1580-1800)

Abstract

Portuguese colonial exploration and settlement in Brazil during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a significant, though to date largely underappreciated, dimension of medical inquiry, the impact of which resonated throughout the Atlantic scientific world and beyond. This paper examines the role and influence within Portugal's maritime dominions of medical techniques, remedies and specific drugs originating in colonial Brazil. It focuses attention on the earliest collaborative interaction between indigenous healers and Portuguese missionaries—mainly Jesuits—on the Brazilian colonial frontier, who then passed that knowledge on to European physicians, surgeons and pharmacists working in colonial South American medical facilities. In such institutions, indigenous techniques were most often employed to the edification of Portuguese colonial agents (missionaries, colonial administrative officials, maritime commanders and state-licensed medical practitioners), who would then become the conduits disseminating those techniques to Europe or other colonial locations.