ABSTRACT
By analyzing several medical treatises written during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this chapter discusses the experience that the authors of these texts accumulated by practicing medicine in colonial Brazil. Because of its more practical character and the empirical apprenticeship it required, the practice of surgery was considered a lesser art, peripheral to the practice of medicine and solely performed by the surgeons or barber-surgeons. The chapter seeks to show that medical and natural historical knowledge produced during the period of Dutch presence in Brazil should not be considered as a separate chapter in the larger history of how European intellectuals sought to understand and classify American nature. Though many analyses of the Natural History seem to point toward the progressive demystification of the world and an increasing control over nature, they tend to forget the extent to which Luso-Brazilian literature was held in the grip of a paradisiacal vision of the New World.
