ABSTRACT
Historians of medicine have largely undervalued, or failed to appreciate entirely, the importance of Portuguese global exploration and colonial settlement, especially relating to botanical prospecting, the treatment of tropical diseases, and the circulation of non-European Indigenous medical substances. Because the Portuguese maritime imperial enterprise began sooner, and was more diverse geographically, culturally, and ecologically than that of any European rival, their exposure to global healing ideas was broader, and was key to conveying Indigenous medical information to Europe and around the globe.
This chapter will consider the circumstances and techniques for the assimilation and codification of medicinal knowledge from Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through Portuguese colonial medical texts and images, this chapter examines how Portuguese colonial agents gathered information for the systematic codification of healing plant knowledge, and for the application of Indigenous medicinal substances. This analysis allows for a comparison of Portuguese colonial efforts with the well-known Dutch medico-botanical publication of the mid-seventeenth century, Piso and Marcgraf's Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. Comparative consideration provides insight into differences in how Dutch and Portuguese colonial agents approached codifying Indigenous medicinal knowledge in colonial Brazil.
