Medicinal Memory Lily Sanders and Mark Joslin

In this episode, the last of its kind, we talked with Dr. Kristen Block about her article “Slavery and Inter-imperial Leprosy Discourse in the Atlantic World” along with her upcoming book, Health, Disease, and the Spirit: Religion, Healing, and the Colonial Body in the Early Caribbean.

This week we are talking about yellow fever, agency, and the environment in Manuel Barcia‘s The Yellow Demon of Fever and J.R. McNeill‘s Mosquito Empires.

This week we had the privilege of talking with a major scholar in Atlantic and Latin American studies, Martha Few, about her book For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightened Guatemala. Dr. Few explains some of the inspirations and major themes of this work, as well as the connections to today’s pandemic responses and some information on future projects. We also have a special guest interviewer, our friend Kaitlin Simpson of the Add Men and Stir Podcast!

This week we discuss ritual, healing, and the rise of different medicinal practices in the colonial Atlantic by discussing two recent and influential works in the field: Pablo F. Gomez’s “The Experiential Caribbean,” and Benjamin Breen’s “The Age of Intoxication.”