Abordagens Interdisciplinares
aos Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia
de Garcia de Orta
Goa, 1563 — Lisboa, 2013
Garcia de Orta and the Medicinal Gardens of the Royal Hospital in Goa:
Implications of Evolving Hybridization in Indo-Portuguese
Colonial Medical Culture
T IMOT HY D. W A L K E R Portuguese colonial exploration and settlement in during the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a significant dimension of medical
inquiry, the impact of which resonated throughout the European scientific world
and beyond. Early contacts with native peoples and sustained missionary activity,
combined with pragmatic attempts to address threats to the health of European
settlers in the Asian tropics, occasioned Portuguese medical-botanical prospecting in India, the Persian Gulf, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and East Africa. Such
pioneering experimentation added extensively to human knowledge and understanding of traditional indigenous healing practices and pharmacological botany.
The enduring impact of these early scientific inquiries (Garcia de Orta’s principal among them) has long outlasted the transient economic importance of the
Lusophone maritime empire. Garcia de Orta’s descriptive work about Asian medicinal plants informed Europeans for the first time about many of the efficacious
drugs commonly employed in indigenous healing traditions. Portuguese colonial
agents spread indigenous drugs and information about South Asian native healing
methods to Europe, as well as to colonized territories in Africa, Brazil and throughout Asia. This paper will focus on the evolving Indo-Portuguese medical context in which Garcia de Orta worked in Goa and Bombay, and the longer-term
implications for the hybridized medical culture that he helped to initiate in Portuguese colonies in South Asia. By the mid-seventeenth century, medical practice in the Portuguese-held enclaves of Asia, and in South India particularly, had
become thoroughly hybridized, with applied remedies in colonial health institutions relying heavily on indigenous medicinal plants. To ensure a ready supply of common local and imported healing herbs, the
Royal Military Hospital in Goa maintained on its premises a medicinal garden,
supervised directly by the Chief Physician of the Portuguese Asian Empire — Garcia de Orta himself. This presentation will explore the role of this hospital as a
multicultural space, wherein European and Malabar (and, indeed, even East African, Malaysian, Indonesian, Chinese and South American) concepts about healing blended. The lecture will describe the physical space of the hospital, its garden, its Indo-Portuguese caretakers and their unique medical cosmology, and the
hospital environment that placed so much importance on the remedies supplied
through this garden’s bounty (indigenous South Asian healing plants). Further,
the presentation will describe various medicinal plants cultivated in Indo-Portuguese hospital gardens, their applications and effects, as well as the social context
in which the medical practitioners who employed these plants operated.
T I M OT H Y D . W AL KE R (B.A., Hiram College, 1986; M.A., Ph.D., Boston University, 2001) is an
Associate Professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. At UMD, he serves
as Fulbright Program Advisor (faculty and students); Associate Director of the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture (2007-2009); a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Portuguese Studies; and an affiliated faculty member of the Center of Indian Studies
and Program in Women’s Studies. �������������������������������������������������������������
Walker is also an Affiliated Researcher of the Centro de História de Além-Mar (CHAM); Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. From 1994 to 2003, he was a
visiting professor at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon. During Fall Term 2010 Walker was a visiting professor at Brown University. He is the author of Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment, Brill Academic Publishers,
2005, and of various contributions to books and journals, including: “Acquisition and Circulation
of Medical Knowledge within the Portuguese Colonial Empire during the Early Modern Period,” in
Science, Power and the Order of Nature in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, Daniela Bleichmar,
Kristin Huffine and Paula De Vos, eds., Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 247-270; “The Early
Modern Globalization of Indian Medicine: Portuguese Dissemination of Drugs and Healing Techniques from South Asia on Four Continents, 1670-1830,” in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 17/18 (2010): 77-98; “European Ambitions and Early Contacts: Diverse Styles of Colonization
(1492-1700),” in Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America, Louise Breen,
ed., Routledge Press, 2011, pp. 16-52; “Supplying Simples for the Royal Hospital: An Indo-Portuguese Medicinal Garden in Goa (1550-1830)” in The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies
of Engagement, Laura Jarnagin, ed., Singapore: The Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2011,
pp. 23-47; and “Stocking Colonial Pharmacies: Commerce in South Asian Indigenous Medicines
from their Native Sources in the Portuguese Estado da Índia”, in Networks in the First Global Age
(1400-1800), Rila Mukherjee, ed., Primus Press, 2011, pp. 113-136.