The Experiential Caribbean

“Piece by piece scholars are foregrounding and incorporating this neglected region as its heritage is taken to the brink. Gómez’s work makes a timely and valuable contribution.”—Journal of American History

“A far more interesting tale of adaptation and creativity in the face of dislocation and competition. Gómez’s books provides a wonderful picture of the Spanish Caribbean’s ‘intellectually eclectic spaces’ (174).”—William & Mary Quarterly

“Gómez has provided an excellent model for how scholars today can see through the smokescreen of ‘modernity’ to recognize the experiential revolution wrought by Black practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.”—American Religion

“Pablo Gómez’s book fills a significant fissure in our understanding of the processes and countervailing forces at play in the production of knowledge in the early modern Atlantic. . . . [R]emarkable. . . . Gómez’s boldly argued book is a welcome contribution to the history of science and medicine in the early modern Caribbean.”—The Americas

“With a sharp eye for epistemic difference, deep knowledge of medical science, and an engaging style, Gómez demonstrates that the scientific revolution took place in the margins of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world, in the hands and minds of people of African descent.”—Bulletin of the History of Medicine

“[Gómez] excels at animating old words to tell stories of lived experience of the seventeenth century . . . [and demonstrating] the continuing vitality of the subject of health and medicine in the scholarship of the Atlantic-era Caribbean.”—New West Indian Guide

“Gómez profitably follows Annemarie Mol in suspending any but performative notions of ontology. . . . This is a bold move for a historian of medicine . . . but is is the step to take if we want to counteract what E. P. Thompson famously called the enormous condescension of posterity when it comes to historical worlds of pain and healing such as those that took shape in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.”—Hispanic American Historical Review

“An important contribution to the emerging field of the social history of health and medicine in the Caribbean and to our understanding of the region’s’ intellectual and cultural past. . . . [A]mbitious and sophisticated. . . . [A] fascinating book that significantly adds to our understanding of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world.”—Bulletin of Latin American Research

“What emerges from Gómez’s investigation is an ever-changing Caribbean where local ideas and practice came to the fore. . . . Recommended.”—CHOICE

“An intriguing book, and an important one. . . . Gómez convincingly shows the vast array of epistemes, or knowledge systems, that came together in the colonial Caribbean’s worlds and points to how the confrontations of these knowledge systems from Africa, the Americas, and Europe were used to heal people.”—H-Caribbean