ABSTRACT
Joao Curvo Semedo was ideally positioned to perform balancing act between the traditional rhetorical modes of the early modern European medical establishment and what Junia Ferreira Furtado has called the “tropical empiricism” of the Portuguese colonies. By 1706, Joao Curvo Semedo was boasting in another pamphlet that his bezoartico had grown popular enough to be “sold throughout the kingdom,” but refrained from detailing its contents except to state that it “consists of sixteen ingredients” which had “effects that were practically miracles.” Early modern pharmaceutical networks thus proceeded from a specific form of information asymmetry. Portuguese trade in both tropical drugs and in human beings highlights how material networks of global exchange shaped Enlightenment thought. Joao Curvo Semedo’s citations also included abundant references to Protestant proponents of chemical medicine and Cartesian theories.
