The "Black Republic of Letters": Reframing the Natural and Medical History of the Early Modern Caribbean

The seventeenth century figures in the historiography of science and medicine as a seismic period wherein the experientia of old authorities gave way to personal observations and autopsia as the most reliable means by which to explain the workings of the natural world and the human body. This paper studies the strategies of knowledge production that early black investigators of the Caribbean natural and medicinal worlds used, as well as the intellectual and cultural spaces in which they operated. West and West Central African specialists, and their intellectual heirs, explored the Caribbean natural world from within their own epistemological realms and created competitive frameworks for explaining the vagaries of health, disease and death. Rather than being separated from the rise of contemporary European knowledge production and epistemological practices – such as experimentation and the creation of hierarchies, taxonomies and nosologies – Black Caribbean Atlantic knowledge practices around the body competed with, interacted with, and both shaped and were shaped by them