Dated - June 25, 2014
Dr. Timothy D. Walker
(Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth)will deliver the inaugural lecture of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth Human Cultures, Experience & Creativity: Change, Exchange & Transformations research cluster
Title: Global cross-cultural dissemination of indigenous medical knowledge and
practices through the Portuguese colonial system: evidence from 16th-18th century ethno-botanical manuscripts
Time: 3pm Thursday 26 June 2014
Venue: An Foras Feasa Boardroom, Iontas Building, North Campus (NUIM)
The History Department will host a reception following the lecture.
All are welcome.
Lecture abstract
Portuguese colonial exploration and settlement during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a significant dimension of medical inquiry, the impact of which resonated throughout the European scientific world and beyond. Early contacts with native peoples and sustained missionary activity, combined with pragmatic attempts to address threats to the health of European settlers in the tropics, occasioned Portuguese medical-botanical prospecting in Africa, India, the Persian Gulf, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and South America. Such pioneering experimentation added extensively to human knowledge and understanding of traditional indigenous healing practices and pharmacological botany. The enduring impact of these early scientific inquiries has long outlasted the transient economic importance of the Lusophone maritime empire. Portuguese descriptive works about Asian and South American medicinal plants in particular informed Europeans for the first time about many of the efficacious drugs commonly employed in indigenous healing traditions. Portuguese colonial agents (missionaries, merchants, military officers, medical practitioners, colonial administrators) spread indigenous drugs and information about various native healing methods to Europe, as well as to colonized territories in Africa, Brazil, and across Asia.
This talk will examine evidence for how that transfer and diffusion of medical knowledge occurred by focusing on numerous descriptive ethno-botanical texts produced in Portuguese colonies during the early modern period, and the worldwide implications of such media for the transfer and evolution of healing practices in the Lusophone world. Dr Walker’s presentation will explore the role of these texts as conduits of multicultural medical knowledge, wherein European and Indian, African, Malaysian, Indonesian, Chinese and South American concepts about healing blended. By the mid-seventeenth century, practical medicine in Portuguese colonial enclaves had reached a state of thorough fusion, with applied remedies in colonial health institutions (whether state-sponsored or religious) relying significantly on the use of diverse indigenous medicinal substances and methods. The illustrated lecture will explicate these missionary and medical practitioners’ texts, their intermingled medical cosmology, and the colonial environment that placed so much importance on the remedies supplied through indigenous healing plants. Further, the presentation will describe various medicinal plants cultivated in Portuguese colonial hospital gardens, their applications and effects, as well as the social context in which the medical practitioners who employed these plants operated.
Biographical profile of Dr Timothy Walker
Dr Walker (B.A., Hiram College, 1986; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University, 2001) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is also an Associate Director of the Centre for Portuguese Studies and Culture (2007-2009) and Director of Tagus Press, both based at UMASS Dartmouth. He is an Affiliated Researcher of the Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar (CHAM) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in Portugal. From 1994 to 2003, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon. In 2010 Walker was a visiting professor at Brown University. An expert in early modern Europe, the Atlantic World, the Portuguese and their empire, maritime history and European global colonial expansion, his current research topics focus on the 17th and 18th centuries, and include the adoption of colonial indigenous medicines by European science during the Enlightenment, slave trading in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, as well as commercial and cultural links between the Portuguese overseas colonies in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Dr Walker’s publications include Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005). He has also guest edited, with Harold J. Cook (Brown University), a special issue of The Social History of Medicine (Vol. 26, n.3 2013). He has recently (2012-13) held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for a project entitled “Global Medical Exchanges in the Portuguese Colonial World”, and has just been awarded a Fred W. Smith National Library Fellowship for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon for a project entitled “Commercial Relationships between George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and the Kingdom of Portugal: Commodities, Ports & Merchants.”
Dr Walker is in Ireland at the moment, working at Archbishop Marsh’s Library, courtesy of a Muriel McCarthy Research Fellowship, awarded for a project entitled “A Survey of Early Northern European Medical Texts to Assess Reciprocal Knowledge Exchanges with the Lusophone World.”