The ‘Other’ Healers: Enslavement, Expertise, and Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Organizers:
Valentina Pugliano, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice - valentina.pugliano@unive.it
Lucia Dacome, Toronto University - lucia.dacome@utoronto.ca

The entanglement of medicine and slavery lies at the heart of some of the most innovative and unsettling research on the Atlantic world. In the Mediterranean context, however—despite new estimates suggesting that between five and nine million individuals were captured and trafficked across its waters between 1500 and 1800—this connection has remained largely unexplored. This absence is all the more striking given that the early modern Mediterranean was a crucible of conflict, negotiation, and exchange, in which health and captivity intersected in ways that profoundly shaped the societies along all its shores.

Existing scholarship has illuminated the legal, financial, and religious dimensions of captivity and corsair warfare, while historians of medicine and science have begun to trace the circulation of remedies, practices, and medical knowledge throughout the region. Yet these strands of research have remained curiously separate. As a result, we still lack a comprehensive investigation of how health was implicated in systems of captivity—of how the bodies of slaves and prisoners became sites where labor was regulated, diplomacy conducted, knowledge transmitted, and cultural differences forged.

This international workshop, bringing together some of the most authoritative scholars of the period, offers the first collective attempt to interweave the histories of medicine and slavery in the Mediterranean world. It highlights not only the scope of the phenomenon, but also the richness of the sources—from judicial records and diplomatic dispatches to inquisitorial proceedings and galley manuals—that enable us to reconstruct the medical dimensions of captivity. In doing so, it seeks to inaugurate a new research agenda: to demonstrate that the study of the early modern Mediterranean can no longer afford to treat medicine and captivity as separate domains, and that only by considering them together is it possible to fully grasp the meaning and significance of slavery in this crucial region of emerging modernity.

Lucia Dacome (University of Toronto), ‘The Soothing Medicaments of the Mahommedans:’ Opium, Slavery, and Health in Early Modern Italy