Speaker
Details
Seventeenth-century New England was a world wrought by death and disease. Amid devastating wars and violent pandemics, Native peoples and settlers alike sought to preserve the health of their communities—and turned to each other to do so. While historians have correctly worked to understand Western science and medicine as a tool of settler power, I look to moments of medical knowledge production and exchange to consider how this this power was contested in early New England. I argue that there was a hybridized medical landscape in early New England, marked by epistemological collisions and contested intellectual boundaries. I complicate linear narratives of settler expansion by demonstrating that Native medical knowledge was not a waning influence but was integral to the health of all peoples in the Northeast and impactful across the Atlantic World. This suggests that both epistemological and cultural boundaries were more porous than historians have previously considered, ultimately recoloring early New England medicine as a space in which Native intellectual and cultural sovereignty persisted amid settler violence.
Pre-Circulated Paper
The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Augustus Mosse.