Chapter 2 examines the circulation and application of medical and ritual knowledge in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, including Venezuela and Panama, and is based upon Inquisition trial records and secular court cases. The chapter approaches healing and ritual as intimately connected and often inseparable activities for African-descended practitioners who were solicited by clients of all ethnicities. Where clients were also people of colour, they were often hired to perform work of community healing. The chapter outlines the gendered and racialised patterns of prosecution and punishment of defendants of African descent tried by the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias. This is followed by an analysis of the mobility and exchange of healing knowledge in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, an examination of the marketplace of ideas, and an exploration of the social worlds in which black specialists practiced. Case studies include that of three Kongolese bondsmen, who had hired Joseph and Thomas to poison his owner in 1740s Cartagena, and that of enslaved man Aja, who was accused by fellow bondspersons, other members of the cuadrilla on the gold mines of San Antonio in the Cauca valley mines (owned by the Convent of the Encarnación in the city of Popayán) in the 1770s.

Chapter 6 looks at how sectoral networks propelled the Anti-Extradition Movement. By focusing on religious groups, legal professionals, and medical practitioners, we demonstrate how social identities informed protesters what roles to take up during a spontaneous movement, and how these sectoral networks provided expertise and resources to facilitate the movement’s organizing efforts.

Though addressed to members of the clergy, the Constituciones del arçobispado y prouincia dela muy ynsigne y muy leal ciudad de Tenuxtitlan Mexico (1556) set aside specific instructions for medical practitioners. Making concessions for surgeons and apothecaries, such as excluding them from fines or allowing them to work on holy days, they were asked to police their patients’ behavior, going as far as to deny follow up care to those who refused confession. Practitioners were also cautioned against prescribing cures for the “good health of the body” that compromised the “good health of the soul.” The religious manuals and vernacular medical texts of sixteenth-century Mexico shared a common language, setting and investment in their emerging community. They followed a prescriptive approach and saw themselves as exercising a corrective social function, capturing in detail the very behaviors they purportedly sought to curtail. This essay examines how physical health and self-discipline were viewed in relation to the colonial body in these sources, considering the ways in which this template was refracted to include the African, indigenous, and female bodies in their pages.