The Limits of a Moral Imagination: Disease and Explanation in Colonial Brazil, 1549–68

As Jesuit missionaries fanned out among the Tupi-speaking peoples of coastal South America, quotidian microbial exchanges led to a string of epidemics. The collapse of indigenous communities followed. Modern historians, physicians, historical epidemiologists, and paleopathologists have attempted to identify these diseases. Such retrospective diagnosis is necessarily speculative and findings remain contentious. Rather than focus on disease agents in modern clinical terms, this paper uses Jesuit letters to explore the meanings of disease as they were made manifest through Jesuit-Tupi interactions. What emerges is a far cry from the familiar portrait of Jesuits as protectors of native peoples and of epidemic disease as enabling colonial dominance. Among the missionaries, growing doubt over their ability to interpret the will of their god (expressed, so they believed, through disease) created dissent and fomented division. The Jesuits’ inability to explain or mitigate the impact of disease also helped undermine their tenuous claims to curative authority among native peoples. Consequently, Tupi medical specialists remained healers of critical importance. Native communities continued to rely on them. And Jesuits embraced treachery, trickery, and violence to eliminate them from colonial medical practice. Hence—in contrast to much research on colonial Spanish America and the greater Southwest—this paper argues that, in Brazil, epidemic disease dissolved the faith of missionaries, empowered native healers, and cemented indigenous resistance.