ABSTRACT
The Atlantic World medical complex fused Amerindian, African, and European traditions. The Atlantic World medical complex refers to medical knowledge and practices that emerged from the mixing and melding of people, plants, and their knowledges across the whole of the Atlantic World. Europeans readily collected and recorded West Indian cures – whatever their provenance. Testing, recording, and publishing cures were carried out in a similar fashion throughout European territories by European-trained physicians. Linguistic evidence suggests that the slave may have learned medicinal uses of bois fer from his French masters. Using shipping records, historical linguistics, and written documents, Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff describe how African slaves naturalized their food staples in the American tropics – especially the Caribbean, where 40 percent of slaves were shipped. J. Alexander acted upon a reasonable hypothesis of where to find a cure when he turned to a man of African origin.
