This groundbreaking monograph explores the fascinating social context of "witchcraft" trials in Portugal during the long eighteenth century, when conventional medical practitioners, motivated by a desire to promote "scientific" medicine, worked within the Holy Office to prosecute superstitious folk healers.

Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the period from 1500 to 1850. Until now, learned medicine has remained a secondary subject in scholarship on Inquisitions. This volume delves into physicians’ contributions to the inquisitorial machinery as well as the persecution of medical practitioners and the censorship of books of medicine. Although they are commonly depicted as all-pervasive systems of repression, the Inquisitions emerge from these essays as complex institutions. Authors investigate how boundaries between the medical and the religious were negotiated and transgressed in different contexts. The book sheds new light on the intellectual and social world of early modern physicians, paying particular attention to how they complied with, and at times undermined, ecclesiastical control and the hierarchies of power in which the medical profession was embedded. Contributors are Hervé Baudry, Bradford A. Bouley, Alessandra Celati, Maria Pia Donato, Martha Few, Guido M. Giglioni, Andrew Keitt, Hannah Marcus, and Timothy D. Walker. This volume includes the articles originally published in Volume XXIII, Nos. 1-2 (2018) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine with one additional chapter by Timothy D. Walker and an updated introduction.

The Enlightenment period, here understood as covering the years 1650 to 1789, is usually considered to be a period when religion was obliged to give way to rationality. With respect to medicine this means that the religious elements in the treatment and interpretation of diseases to all intents and purposes disappeared. However, there are growing indications in recent scholarship that this may well be an overstatement. Indeed it appears that religion retained many of its customary relations with medicine. This volume explores how far, and the ways in which, this was still the case. It looks at this multi-faceted relationship with respect to among others: medical care and death in hospitals, religious vocation and nursing, chemical medicine and religion, the clergy and medicine, the continued significance of popular medicine, faith healing, dissection and religion, and religious dissent and medical innovation. Within these significant areas the volume provides a European perspective which will make it possible to draw comparisons and determine differences.

The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the lives, places, and stories of women in the Iberian Atlantic between 1500 and 1800. Distinguished contributors such as Ida Altman, Matt D. Childs, and Allyson M. Poska utilize the complexities of gender to understand issues of race, class, family, health, and religious practices in the Atlantic basin. Unlike previous scholarship, which has focused primarily on upper-class and noble women, this book examines the lives of those on the periphery, including free and enslaved Africans, colonized indigenous mothers, and poor Spanish women. Chapters range broadly across time periods and regions of the Atlantic world. The authors explore the lives of Caribbean women in the earliest era of Spanish colonization and gender norms in Spain and its far-flung colonies. They extend the boundaries of the traditional Atlantic by analyzing healing knowledge of indigenous women in Portuguese Goa and kinship bonds among women in Spanish East Texas. Together, these innovative essays rechart the Iberian Atlantic while revealing the widespread impact of women's activities on the emergence of the Iberian Atlantic world.

This volume centers on dreams in Greek medicine from the fifth-century B.C.E. Hippocratic Regimen down to the modern era. Medicine is here defined in a wider sense than just formal medical praxis, and includes non-formal medical healing methods such as folk pharmacopeia, religion, ’magical’ methods (e.g., amulets, exorcisms, and spells), and home remedies. This volume examines how in Greek culture dreams have played an integral part in formal and non-formal means of healing. The papers are organized into three major diachronic periods. The first group focuses on the classical Greek through late Roman Greek periods. Topics include dreams in the Hippocratic corpus; the cult of the god Asclepius and its healing centers, with their incubation and miracle dream-cures; dreams in the writings of Galen and other medical writers of the Roman Empire; and medical dreams in popular oneirocritic texts, especially the second-century C.E. dreambook by Artemidorus of Daldis, the most noted professional dream interpreter of antiquity. The second group of papers looks to the Christian Byzantine era, when dream incubation and dream healings were practised at churches and shrines, carried out by living and dead saints. Also discussed are dreams as a medical tool used by physicians in their hospital praxis and in the practical medical texts (iatrosophia) that they and laypeople consulted for the healing of disease. The final papers deal with dreams and healing in Greece from the Turkish period of Greece down to the current day in the Greek islands. The concluding chapter brings the book a full circle by discussing how modern psychotherapists and psychologists use Ascelpian dream-rituals on pilgrimages to Greece.

Internationalisation of medical knowledge, its circulation and implementation through colonial institutions have played a significant role in combating diseases of public health importance. With contributions from reputed faculty and researchers, this volume examines the dynamics of circulation of medical knowledge and the creation of webs of empire through medical curiosities, medical and architectural knowledge, medical manuscripts, African agency, medical ideas and management of diseases, surgical and anatomical knowledge and a collective scientific enterprise in translating ‘local’ to ‘universal’ paradigms of practice.

Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist. Focusing on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen examines the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. He then turns his attention to the British Empire, arguing that it owed much of its success in this period to its usurpation of the Portuguese drug networks. From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the cannabis that an East Indies merchant sold to the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in one of the earliest European coffeehouses, Breen shows how drugs have been entangled with science and empire from the very beginning. Featuring numerous illuminating anecdotes and a cast of characters that includes merchants, slaves, shamans, prophets, inquisitors, and alchemists, The Age of Intoxication rethinks a history of drugs and the early drug trade that has too often been framed as opposites—between medicinal and recreational, legal and illegal, good and evil. Breen argues that, in order to guide drug policy toward a fairer and more informed course, we first need to understand who and what set the global drug trade in motion.

Students notoriously vote with their feet, seeking out the best and most innovative teachers of their subject. The most ambitious students have been travelling long distances for their education since universities were first founded in the thirteenth century, making their own educational pilgrimage or peregrinatio. This volume deals with the peregrinatio medica from the viewpoint of the travelling students: who went where; how did they travel; what did they find when they arrived; what did they take back with them from their studies. Even a single individual could transform medical studies or practice back home on the periphery by trying to reform teaching and practice the way they had seen it at the best universities. Other contributions look at the universities themselves and how they were actively developed to attract students, and at some of the most successful teachers, such as Boerhaave at Leiden or the Monros at Edinburgh. The essays show how increasing levels of wealth allowed more and more students to make their pilgrimages, travelling for weeks at a time to sit at the feet of a particular master. In medicine this meant that, over the period c.1500 to 1789, a succession of universities became the medical school of choice for ambitious students: Padua and Bologna in the 1500s, Paris, Leiden and Montpellier in the 1600s, and Leiden, Gottingen and Edinburgh in the 1700s. The arrival of foreign students brought wealth to the university towns and this significant economic benefit meant that the governors of these universities tried to ensure the defence of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, thus providing the best conditions for the promotion of new views and innovation in medicine. The collection presents a new take on the history of medical education, as well as universities, travel and education more widely in ancien regime Europe.

In this volume, a microhistorical approach is employed to provide a transcription, translation, and case-study of the proceedings (written in Latin, Italian and Arabic) of the Roman Inquisition on Malta’s 1605 trial of the ‘Moorish’ slave Sellem Bin al-Sheikh Mansur, who was accused and found guilty of practising magic and teaching it to the local Christians. Through both a detailed commentary and individual case-studies, it assesses what these proceedings reflect about religion, society, and politics both on Malta and more widely across the Mediterranean in the early 17th century. In so doing, this inter- and multi-disciplinary project speaks to a wide range of subjects, including magic, Christian-Muslim relations, slavery, Maltese social history, Mediterranean history, and the Roman Inquisition. It will be of interest to both students and researchers who study any of these subjects, and will help demonstrate the richness and potential of the documents in the Maltese archives. With contributions by: Joan Abela, Dionisius A. Agius, Paul Auchterlonie, Jonathan Barry, Charles Burnett, Frans Ciappara, Pierre Lory, Alex Malett, Ian Netton, Catherine R. Rider, Liana Saif

This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readers that ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world.