Galenism and Ayurveda: shaping and registration of medical and pharmaceutical practices in Goa (Eighteenth Century)

• Grant number: 22/02706-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: August 01, 2022
• End date: October 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Ana Carolina de Carvalho Viotti
• Grantee: Vitória Marchetto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/13599-7 - Medicina Oriental: study about a medical and pharmaceutical book written in Goa (Eighteenth-Century), BE.EP.MS

Abstract

In the Eighteenth Century, in the context of abandonment over the ciy of Goa, capital of the so called Portuguese India, the elevated disease levels and high mortality rates among the native people and europeans living in the western portion of the empire had, among its consequences, a raise in the need for atention in the treatment of the body. At that moment, the lack of professionals educated according to the european medical traditions was considered concerning, standart imposed by the portuguese authorities as ideal to the treatment of the sick peolple, fact that laid this work over especially the natives who practiocioned ayurveda and the jesuits on mission in the Estado da Índia, which job of take care of the diseased was expressed in their Compromissos. Despite the appreciation and preference by those educated according the Western medicine, one can witness the use of the hindu medical tradition, employed especially to treatment of the sickness to which the european methodes showed themselves to be inadequate, or even ineffective. The present work dedicates to the study of the medical books produced in the Eighteenth-Century Goa, after a time when the scrutiny of the western nature potencialities until the raise of a goan físico-mor (who was in charge of supervise the medical exercise), in the last decades of the century. From four manuscripts that describe theories, methods, ingredients and values related to medical and pharmaceutical prescriptions, we aim to indentify and understand this process of treatment to the diseased of different inspirations and justification, in a dinamic, non uniform and disputed moviment, in which frontiers mark at the same time differences and reunite these different traditions.