Workshop with Pablo Gómez, Associate Professor of History and the History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison: "Body Arithmetic: Slavery, Facts, Quantification, and the Human in the Early Modern World"

This talk examines the history of the slave trade in the early modern Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds and its relationship to the emergence of novel practices related to the study and quantification of bodies and nature and the emergence of ideas about corporeal facticity. The mathematics of early slave trading societies, I argue, carried meaning that reified and institutionalized body quantification and population/group thinking in relation to labor, health, and disease. The everyday practice of accounting for enslaved African bodies shaped and solidified the logic and permanence of bodily quantification as the fundamental tool for measuring populations, their bodies, and their relationship to emerging notions of risk, political economy, public health, and epidemiology in the early-modern world. Focusing on the relationship between the violent world of slavery, emerging colonial capitalism, and African diasporic histories of knowledge-making brings to light the fundamental continuity that exists between the enslavement of millions of Africans and the history of modern quantifiable ideas about corporeality.

Pablo Gomez's work focuses on the history of knowledge, science, and the history of health and corporeality in Latin America, the Caribbean, the African diaspora and, more generally, the Iberian and Black Atlantic Worlds. My book, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (winner of the William H. Welch medal, the Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize, and Honorable Mention-Bolton-Johnson Book Prize), explores belief making and the creation of evidence around the human body and the natural world in the early modern Caribbean. My recently published edited volume, The Gray Zones of Medicine, examines the role of unlicensed health practitioners in the shaping of Latin American history from the colonial time to the present. I am currently working on a history of the quantifiable body and the development of novel ideas about risk, labor, and disease that appeared in Atlantic slave markets during the seventeenth century. I’m also leading a project on a re-framing of global histories of Science Medicine and Technology and am actively involved in projects of digital archival preservation in Colombia, Cuba and Brazil.