The history of science in the early modern Iberian world is a blooming field. The recent decades have provided excellent contributions in English from historians based in both US and European universities and research centers, not to mention myriad studies authored by scholars based in the Iberian Peninsula, who usually publish in their own languages. As in many other areas of history, the Portuguese side of this story is often the poor cousin. This is especially true for the subject of colonial medicine prior to the nineteenth century, which is what Assembling the Tropics primarily covers; hence a reason, among many others, to welcome Hugh Cagle's first book. We have substantive studies for Dutch and British colonial medicine, but the Portuguese empire has lacked so far an all-encompassing, argumentative study, despite the solid work produced by several historians, especially Timothy Walker.
Written at the crossroads of various fields, Assembling the...
