EIHS Lecture: Risk, Bodies, and Disease: Transatlantic Slavery and the History of Science and Medicine

This talk will examine the history of the slave trade in the Iberian Atlantic and its relationship to the emergence of novel practices related to the study and quantification of bodies and nature. Specifically, it will discuss the development of ideas about the human body, population, and disease that appeared in Iberian-Atlantic slave markets during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practices undergirding the development of the slave trade as a technological, bureaucratic, economic, legal, and intellectual enterprise went hand in hand with the appearance of new notions about risk, disease, nosology, and population health that would become normative in subsequent decades. In analyzing the invisibility of both this history and the archives of the slave trade in traditional HSMT narratives, this lecture will also examine the role that ideas about knowledge (and what constitutes knowledge) have had in shaping fundamental and exclusionary tenets in the histories of science and Medicine in Euro America.

Pablo F. Gómez is associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on histories of knowledge-making, race, and health and corporeality with a particular focus on Latin America, the Caribbean, and more largely the African Diaspora. His book The Experiential Caribbean Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic, won the William H. Welch medal in medical history, the Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize in Africana religion, and Honorable Mention for the Bolton-Johnson Book Prize in Latin American history.

Free and open to the public. This is a remote event and will take place online via Zoom.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.