Medical Encounters

"An interesting, informative, and important book. Medical Encounters provides a new lens through which we can see moments of cultural encounter as rich with information about Native, African, and European beliefs and experiences."—Kristina Bross, author of Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America

"Wisecup's book effectively advocates for medical literature as a rich repository for intercultural exchange and a locus for negotiating the structure of intercultural relations. Her texts disclose a wide-ranging epistemic network, just as they underscore the anxious and continuous work of colonist authors of medical literature to invest their writing with authority and mastery rather than evidence of spiritual, imaginative, and bodily corruption. . . . A clear attestation to the import of medical phenomena to understanding early America."—The New England Quarterly

"Wisecup is at her best when underscoring the metaphysical connections among European, native, and African medical traditions. Recommended."—Choice

"Medical Encounters is a provocative work that pushes scholars to take seriously the contributions of Natives and Africans in the production of knowledge and the development of medical practices in early British North America. . . . Wisecup shows the process by which colonial accounts wiped away African sources and hid African knowledge systems."—William and Mary Quarterly

"Her explication of the shifting classifications of medical knowledge as religion, magic, and science will be of interest not only to early Americanists but also to historians of science and medicine."—American Literature