Paper short abstract:

This work aims at offering reflections and analysis conducted on enslaved bodies – with regard to the diseases that affected them – during the Empire of Brazil of the nineteenth century, a time of contention between the different groups mastering the arts of healing during the XIX century.

Paper long abstract:

This work aims at offering reflections and analysis conducted on enslaved bodies – about to the diseases that affected them – during the Empire of Brazil of the nineteenth century, a time of controversies between the different groups mastering the arts of healing during the XIX century.

In order to do this, various knowledge has been mobilized about the healing of diseased bodies since the arrival of the Jesuits, in 1549, in that time’s Portuguese America. The diasporic dimension enabled and increased the experiences, the exchanges and the notions within the practices of healing and care of ill bodies. The scenarios that came up through the XIX century, not only at court, but mostly in the nearby rural areas, provide the means for a significant study of the medical view of such matters. It is worth mentioning the relevance, within such scenarios, of traditional healers, sorcerers, obstetricians, and bleeders who contended Black, mulatto, white, poor, enslaved, freed and free spaces. Yet, how do we ought to think the African enslaved body in this context? Medical narratives – from Brazil and abroad – favor the access to such knowledge (from Africa as well as from Europe), the peculiarities, the worldviews and the views of Africa that they conveys. The Manual do Fazendeiro ou Tratado Doméstico sobre as enfermidades dos Negros (1839) allows us to access the theories about enslaved bodies of Jean-Baptiste Alban Imbert, a French doctor member of the imperial court. Reading between the lines of this Manual one can find knowledge of anatomy, with detailed descriptions of African bodies, of their origin, culture, their major diseases, medicines, treatments and cures: dilated explanations regarding the micro and macro universes of the society of that time.