1

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

Drugs, Health, Bodies and Souls in the Tropics;
Medical Experiments in Sixteenth-century Portuguese India
Gaspar Correa's vivid and frightening description of the cholera epidemic
which swept the city of Goa during the monsoon period of 1543 is probably the firstrecorded, accurate and almost "clinical" observation of this illness with no other but a
local name - moryxy. Domestic animals and men and women of all ages from toddlers
to old men of eighty, died with horrible stomach pains, twisting their shivering limbs
as their nails turned progressively black, only to die within twenty-four hours. The
survival rate was barely ten out of a hundred sick and up to twenty people were buried
daily in the city of Goa. Unprepared to deal with a public catastrophe of suchdimensions, the Governor, Dom Martim Afonso de Sousa, banned the use of church
bells for each and every burial in order to calm the panic among the distressed
citizens.
" And since the illness was so terrifying when a man died of this illness ofmorexy in the hospital, the Governor ordered all doctors (mestres) to assemble
and he ordered to open him [his body] and in all the body inside they did not
find anything wrong, except for the shrunken stomach, as small as the hen's
gizzard, and wrinkled as leather put on fire. What the doctors said about it wasthat the ill effects of this disease attacked the stomach and shrunk it withimmediate mortal consequences." 1More than idle curiosity or "scientific" impulse, urgent public health concerns were at
the heart the Governor's decision to order the post mortem dissection. Most of thedoctors and officials present at this exemplary anatomical lesson must have felt
excitement at the possibility of reading the human body from the inside. At least
some of them must have also felt that what they saw with their own eyes were theclear signs of some fateful demonic action. At the back of every Christian mind,
illness was associated with sin, and the Torrid Zone of India was reputed to abound in
both. In Correa's own words, the duration of the illness was "an inferno" and thesignature inscribed inside the body was that of fire.
The tropical climate which the Portuguese encountered in India was held
responsible for these and similar epidemic outbreaks since, according to theunchallenged Galenic humoral theory, the disease was caused by an imbalance in thefour humors (choler or bile, blood, phlegm and melancholer or black bile) whichconstituted the body in the same way the four elements (fire, water, air and earth)made up the physical world of things.2 According to the received wisdom repeatedover and over in Portuguese documents, under the excess of heat and/or water at the1

Correa, Gaspar, Lendas da India, (ed. Rodrigo José de Lima Felner), Lisbon, 1864, vol. 4, pp. 288289. In the same chapter Correa uses at least two more variants of the same name: mordexy andmorexy. See also, Coutinho, Fortunato, Le règime paroisial des diocèses de rite latin de l'Inde desorigines (XIV siècle) à nos jours, Louvain, 1958; Albuquerque, Luís de, Martim Afonso de Sousa, Biblioteca
da Expansão Portuguesa, Lisbon, 1989; Schurhammer, Georg, "Cartas de Martim Afonso de Sousa", Orientalia[Gesammelte Studien, vol. II], IHSI/Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarino, Rome/Lisbon, 1963, pp. 185-205.
2

On Greek antiquity healing strategies, see Lloyd, G.E.R., Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies inthe Life Sciences in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, 1983. See also, Grmek, Mirko, Les maladies à l'aube
de la civilisation occidentale: recherche sur la réalité pathologique dans le monde grec préhistorique,archaïque et classique, Paris, 2nd ed. 1994.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

2

peaks of the two seasons identified in India, health risks for the unadapted Portuguese
newcomers were high. Just as the individual corporal balance was to be restored bydrawing off an excess of one of the humors under the expert eye of a physician or asurgeon, the ailing public body of the Portuguese community in Goa, and elsewhere in
India and Asia, required "extreme measures" under the authoritative guidance of aGovernor or a Viceroy.3 While recovering health used to and continued to be a private
responsibility, epidemics came to be regarded as political issues equal in importanceto military campaigns or defensive strategies.4
The desire to protect the body, to survive and to be healthy, closely connectedwith the desire to enjoy other bodies (sexually or otherwise), became the subject of ahidden geometry of power relations in which medicine and criminality, religion andwitchcraft, self-interest and public welfare played tricks on each other. The ideal ofhealthy individual and social bodies, as well as the desire of maximum longevity, wasthus subjected to a variety of, at times contrary initiatives. By looking into two
different, yet compatible, "health schemes" proposed to the Portuguese colonial
authorities in Goa, one by a New Christians physician, Garcia de Orta, and the otherby the members of the Society of Jesus, I will argue that the former celebrates medical
diversity, pharmaceutical and botanical ("scientific") rigor and the endless adaptabilityof European bodies to various ecological environments, while the latter conceived of
medical cure as social and psychological uniformization, ordering and disciplining. In
other words, Orta proposed tools for harnessing and putting to use the products of thelocal, tropical nature, while the Jesuit medical impulse charted the way for a new"hygienic sensibility" enabling secular and ecclesiastical authorities to efficiently
manage multitudes of human bodies and souls.5
Choleric Times: A Scientist in the Shadow of the Inquisition
Even before the establishment of the Inquisition in Goa, in 1560, at least two
New Christians were burnt at the stake on two separate occasions, the first in 1539
and the second in 1543, the year in which cholera decimated the population of Goa.6
The Governor, Martim Afonso de Sousa, who supervised the mutilation of a cholericcorpse, presided over the trial against the bacharel de medicina, Jerónimo Dias, who
was condemned to have his "body burnt alive and made into dust, because of theheresy against our holy Catholic faith."7 Garcia de Orta, another New Christianphysician was most certainly present on these two solemn occasions. Nevertheless,twenty years latter, by then himself a famous local sábio and médico, whose body but
3"Desperate cases need the most desperate remedies" is an aphorism from the Hippocratic collectionof Aphorisms. See, Henry, John, "Doctors and healers: popular culture and the medical profession", inStephen Pumfrey, Paolo L. Rossi and Maurice Slawinski, Science, Culture and Popular Belief in
Renaissance Europe, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1991, p.201
4Cipolla, C.M., Contro un nemico invisibile: epidemie e strutture sanitarie nell'Italia delRinascimento, Bologna, 1986 (edition in French, Contre un enemi invisible, Paris, 1992).
5
According to Norbert Elias, in Europe, from the 15th century onward, maintaining personal hygiene
was an aristocratic strategy of establishing social distance. Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, I:
The History of Manners, Oxford, 1978. For the shift in British perception of Indian sanitary habits inlight of Elias's theory see, Harrison, Mark, Climates and Constitutions; Health, Race, Environment andBritish Imperialism in India, 1600-1850, New Delhi, 1999. See also, Faure, Olivier, "Les stratégies
sanitaires", Histoire de la pensée médicale en Occident, 2; De la Renaissance aux Lumières, Paris,
1996.
6
Cunha, Ana Cannas da, A Inquisição no Estado da Índia. Origens (1539-1560), Lisbon, 1995, p. 252253.
7
Correa, Lendas, IV, p. 292-293.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris3

not his bones were to be spared the Inquisitorial fire, he dedicated a book to his early
patron and protector, Dom Martim Afonso de Sousa, who was at the time a close
adviser of the Dowager Queen Dona Catarina, the regent and grandmother of the
future tragic King Dom Sebastião. 8
Orta's dedicatory address in Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia, is no
more original than a typical captatio benevolentiae intended to ingratiate the author tohis protectors or to his readers.9 Armed with classical references, the author succeeds
both in praising the aristocratic virtues of a Portuguese fidalgo, his "heroic deeds" thatearned him "an immortal fame", while blaming those of laziness who allow "theirforces of the body and the soul to sleep", only to carve for himself an almost divinerole as one who "assists the mortals with some scriptures (writings)".10 Although it
would be too speculative to venture an interpretation of this statement as a hidden signof "Judaizing", as the inquisitors may have done during his trial in 1580, Orta's selfrighteous, authorial invectives do resemble a voice of somebody who bestowed thelaw, rather than composed a description. However, his law is not about people, it isabout plants and things or at least, this is what on the surface the text he wants us tobelieve. The pun on his name, Orta or Horta (=Garden), was all too obvious andrhetorically useful. Luís de Camões calls his work "O fruto daquella Orta onde
florecem/ Prantas novas, que os doutos não conhecem", while for another doctor,
Dimas Bosque, Orta's friend and contemporary, he was a "garden of simples and fruitsof India" 11. It is no wonder that Orta, also nicknamed o Ervas (Herbs), likened his
book to a plant. Thus he pleaded with the former Governor of Goa:
"wanting to plant some delicate plants, they [agriculturists] shore them up
against some mighty trees in order to defend them against tempestuous windand strong rains and harsh frost, in the same way I wanted to plant this fragile
plant under protection of your lordship, with which it will be defended against
most of the world".12
As long as his powerful and noble friend and his influential relatives such as Tomazde Orta (a royal physician) were alive and politically strong, according to the historian
Augusto da Silva Carvalho, Orta's biographer, he and his family in Portugal and Goa
were left in relative peace by the Inquisition.13 Hence, it rings true when, beyond the
mandatory literary topos and courtesy, Orta's first desire in the Colóquios concerns
the health, prosperity and longevity of his protector. "Let God make prosperous theillustrious status of your lordship, and let it grow with honorable titles through longyears, as I desire". Moreover, Orta construes his fidalgo protector not merely as his
social and political patron, but also as his teacher "in [Sousa's] military and courtly
school". In fact, more than a garden, Orta's book resembles a classroom.
The first Colóquio - staged as a dialogue between his two principal
protagonists and each other's double, Orta himself and a Spanish physician Ruano,
8

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700; A Political and Economic
History, Longman, London and New York, 1993, p. 90.
9Orta, Garcia de, Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas he Cousas Medicinais da India…, Goa, 1563, (facsimile edition
by Academia das Ciências de Lisboa), Lisbon, 1963. I quote from the annotated edition by Conde de Ficalho,
published in 1891 and reprinted in 1987, [ henceforth: Orta].
10

Orta, vol. 1, p. 4.
Orta, vol. 1, p. 8 and 11. "The fruit of that Garden where they bloom/ new plants, unknown to thelearned". The first poem by Luís de Camões to appear in print is precisely the one on the dedicatory
pages of Orta's book.
12
Orta, vol. 1, p. 5
13
Carvalho, Augusto da Silva, Garcia d'Orta, Comemoração do quarto centenário da sua partida paraa India em 12 março de 1534, Coimbra, 1934, p. 39.
11

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

4

who like Sancho Pansa and Dom Quijote at times exchange roles - serves partly as anexordium. From the mouth of Ruano, the program of the book is given withremarkable precision:"I have a great desire to learn about medical drugs (those which in Portugal arecalled of the pharmacy) and other simple [or herbal] remedies (mézinhas
simples), that exist here, and all the fruits, and pepper. About all these things I
would like to know the names in all the languages, as well as all the countries
in which they grow and about the trees and plants that produce them, and also
would like to know how they were used by the Indian physicians (físicosindianos), and also I would like to know some other plants and fruits of thisland, although they are not medical, and about some customs of the country[…] all these things should be true, seen by you or by persons worthy offaith".14
Orta the ethno-botanist and pharmacologist followed aconsistently inductive method
and therewith roughly delineated sequences throughout the book.15 In discussing
particular medications and plants, he would add his own clinical observations
regarding curative properties, or culinary virtues, or any other "curious" information.
As a good "gardener" he grew most of the plants himself, either in the backyard of his
house in rua dos Namorados in the middle of the bustling and dirty city of Goa, or on
lands leased to him on the island of Bombaim, at the exact location of today's
Mumbai.16
His was, therefore, a world of perishable consumables, to be grown, bought,
exchanged, to be sold , cooked, eaten, tasted or rubbed on the body. By confiding andconfining these objects to his Colóquios, Orta tried to preserve them, to paraphrase
Francis Zimmermann, both as objets à manger and objets à penser.17 Stringed inalphabetic order, at least until the twenty-fourth chapter18, the things and theirmultiple names are manipulated from one role to another, from one state to another.
They are turned into juices, boiled, distilled, changed to stones. Aloes, the first plantin his herbarium is defined first by its Latin and Greek name "aloes, or aloe" and thenby as many names as his research permitted him to collect. "The Arabs call it cebar,
and the Gujeratis and Decanis areá, the Canarins (who inhabit this strip of sea shore)
call it catecomer, and the Castillians acibar, and the Portuguese azevre."19 As much as
names are undoubtedly useful, even indispensable, for his classificatory tasks, that is,transforming "real" things into "learnt" objects of science, an annoying problem ofproper "identification" submerged much of his analytical efforts. Cutting throughlinguistic misappropriations, Orta was both dismayed and excited about his discovery
that one and the same word might mean different things for different peoples and at
14

Orta, vol. 1, p. 19.
For a semiotic reading of Colóquios, see Luís Filipe de Sousa Barreto, "Garcia de Orta e o diálogo
civilizacional", Albuquerque, Luís de & Guerreiro, Inácio, II Seminário internacional de história IndoPortuguesa, actas, Lisbon, 1985, pp. 544-569.
16
Cunha, J. Gerson da, The origin of Bombay, Bombay, 1900, pp. 90-106. On acclimatization gardens
in Europe see Grove, Richard, "Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for
Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature", in Grove, R.H., Damodaran, V., Sangwan, S.,
eds., Nature and the Orient, New Delhi, 1998, pp.187-209.
17
Zimmermann, Francis, Le discours des remèdes au pays des épices; Enquête sur la médicine
hindoue, Paris, 1989, p. 50. The same author has written two more books on the Indian ayurvedic
medical theory and practice: Généalogie des médicines douces; De l'Inde à l'Occident, Paris, 1995 andLe jungle et le fumet des viandes, Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindou, Paris, 1982.
18
The book has 58 colloquies.
19
Orta, vol. 1, p. 25.
15

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

5different times. At the same time, botanical linguistic relativism allowed him tolaunch an attack on the Ancients, Greek and Roman naturalists and physicians,
Dioscorides, Galen and Hippocrates among the most famous, and to rebel against
textual authorities in general, from medieval Arabic and Jewish scholars such as
Avicenna, Razi, Averroës, to his contemporaries Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Andrés de
Laguna, Leonardus Fuchius and others.20
Direct observation of phenomena and personal experience led to Orta's highest
ideal – the truth about the world. The exchanges between Ruano and Orta mimic andecho an inquisitorial scene obsessed in a similar way with truth about the self. To
Ruano's probing questions phrased in way to solicit high-strung answers, Orta
exclaims: "I have not tried it", "I have not seen it there", "I do not doubt because I've
seen it with my eyes". In spite of his amicable relation to his invented "double",whose name, according to Carvalho, betrays a Spanish New Christian origin, Orta
seems to respond in a series of defensive moves, as if it were a dress rehearsal for theultimate nightmarish and real inquisitorial showdown. Multiplying invitations, fromthe first page onwards, to tell and disseminate the truth, Orta positions himself as
aggressively self-righteous: "Do not frighten me with Dioscorides or Galen, for I will
not say but the truth and what I know".21 These two ancient experts, Orta's "torturers",
were downgraded even further in a much cited phrase, "I say that today one learns
more in one day with the Portuguese than was known in one hundred years with the
Romans".22 The chronological split between Moderns and Ancients, a routine
invocation by any respectable academic degree holder of Orta's generation, is doubled
by geographical distance. If he were in Spain, he told Ruano, "I would not dare to sayanything against Galen or the Greeks."23 Presumably the control of thought wasstronger in the metropolis than in the periphery.
India was for Orta the closest he could get to a frontier of freedom where the"truth is painted naked" and where a only long stay in the country, diligent inquiry
and experience count.24 And, thus, he bitterly commented on the lack of curiosity of
the Portuguese soldiers and merchants. They were driven only to acquire riches andcarnal satisfaction. Early to the Portuguese colonial experience in India, these andsimilar accusations became a commonplace in official and private correspondence
from India and in Portuguese literature. The desire for goods and for women seems tohave gone awry overseas. The arrival of the Jesuit missionaries, a year before thecholera epidemic and the auto da fé of Jerónimo Dias, and the advent of postTridentine reforms a few decades later, marked an increased sense of urgency toremedy and control these unruly impulses. The Catholic frontier which the Jesuits or
the "soldiers of Christ" came to advance, had to be purified from the inside out fromsin and moral turpitude.
Carnal Excesses in the Tropics

20

The listing of all the authors cited in Colóquios is given by Conde de Ficalho, Garcia da Orta e o seu
tempo, (reprodução fac-similada da 1.a edição, Lisbon, 1886), Lisbon, 1983, pp.284-297. On medieval
Arabic medicine see, Bürgel , J. Christoph, "Secular and Religious Features of Medieval Arabic
Medicine", in Leslie, Charles, Asian Medical Systems; A Comparative Study, (first ed. 1976) New
Delhi, 1998.
21
Orta,vol. 1, p. 105
22
Orta, vol. 1p. 210.
23
Orta, vol. 1 p. 84.
24
Orta, vol. 1 p. 79.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

6

Orta the physician and Francis Xavier (a future saint), a médico da alma in
Jesuit vocabulary, might have possibly met each other at the table or by the death-bed
of some of their patients. Although the Padre Santo penetrated portas adentro, inorder to reform the Portuguese tropical household, where men lived in sin withconcubines in order to cleanse them from sensuality, his principal goal was eternalsalvation. In the last instance, Jesuit psychotherapy was geared to ensure a good
Christian death, not necessarily a good life. Orta's goal was exactly opposite: it was
to ensure healthy life, to bring his ailing patients back to their senses, to stimulate
their vital desires and, why not, their sexual pleasure. If he pays lip service to theChristian "pessimist" tradition which kept the umbilical cord between sin and illness
unbroken, he did so with little conviction.
The pages of the Colóquios abound in aphrodisiac stimulants to be extracted
from tropical plants and substances, and they are laconically prescribed without
moralizing. Amber, asafetida, bhang (hashish), benzoin, opium, and many others
contribute to "conversation with women", "to lift the member" , "to increase coitus",
etc.25 Not only do they increase venereal pleasure, they also increase commercial
profits. Besides, soap, opium and bhang represented a significant part of the staterevenues from farmed taxes.26 An important tip for merchants in Europe (andmetaphorically perhaps even tongue-in-cheek for missionaries) planning to trade in
Asia was not to import useless items such as raiz angelica (angelic root) or raiz do
Espitio Santo (root of the Holy Spirit), which was reputed to repress sexual desire,since no Indian would want to buy it. Substances that change the consciousness, from
perfumes to dangerous drugs and poisons, according to Orta, seem to have been
especially appreciated by the local population. Their effects liberated otherwise
constrained bodies to do unimaginable things. The ill-fated Sultan Bahadur confided
to Martim Afonso de Sousa that when he wanted to travel the world, to Portugal,
Brazil, Turkey, Arabia or Persia, he simply took a bit of bhang.27 Prostitutes whowanted to be entertaining did the same.
Curing bodies with an excess of poison, blood, phlegm, wind, etc., was a
primary task for the physicians. But how does one cure unruly and, from the Christian
point of view, profoundly sinful desires that seem to have been endemic in the tropicalclimate? For Orta, however, as licentious as they might be, there were no sinful
desires. This is the reason why his text, rich in ethno-medical details, gossip andcuriosities, does not provide for eroticized reading. One of the most tantalizing of all
exotic plants in the Indian herbarium was datura. In spite of much confusion between
various datura species, which did not have the same medicinal or toxic virtues, thename itself became associated with a particular type of sexual and socialtransgression. Cristóvão da Costa as one of the earliest witnesses of datura's
disconcerting qualities as a substance and its seductive appeal as a textual enticement.
Probably a New Christian himself, he came to Cochin in 1568 – the year in which
Orta died - and returnd to Spain in time to write and publish his treatise in Burgos, in
1578, Tractado delas drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales, con sus Plantas
debuxadas ai biuo por Christoual Acosta medico y cirujano que las vio ocularmente,
before dying shortly thereafter.28 For someone who was characterized as a vagamundo
25

Orta, vol. 1pp. 52, 76, 86, 96,104.
Orta, vol. 1, p.100.
27
Orta, vol. 1, p.97
28
Acosta , Christoval [Cristóbal or in Port. Christóvão da Costa], Tractado delas drogas, y medicinas delas Indias Orientales, con sus plantas debuxadas al bivo por Christoval Acosta medico y cirujano quelas vio ocularmente, Brugos, 1578, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, RES 4055P[henceforth: Costa]. For
26

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

7

and a picaresque adventurer, Costa's work was in fact closer to the style adopted by
Charles de l'Écluse, the famous translator into Latin of the Colóquios and of theTractado.29 He dropped the dialogic form and any pretence of literary effects andadopted instead a record-keeping narrative with ample annotations in the margins.
Approaching things descriptively and employing the "invisible-hand" explanation
point to Costa's "scientific" intentions. In the same way, the use and abuse of daturaby the "mundane" women of Goa who inebriated men for as many hours as theywanted, is phrased as objective evidence, in spite of its briefly erotic charge.30 The
same story, and one could suspect that Costa's account was the initial inspiration,
grew into a full-fledged tropical topos.
Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who traveled through the Portuguese Asia from
1584 to 1592, added spice and spite to it.31 In his account it was not just Goan
prostitutes who poisoned their clients with this plant, but married women did the same
their husbands, "so that in his presence they may do what they will, and take theirpleasure with their friends, and the husband never know of it".32 This behavior is onlya drop on the larger canvas of spiritual squalor and physical licentiousness in
Portuguese society in Asia which Linschoten painted for his Dutch audience.
According to Pyrard de Laval, all women in India used this drug in order to trick those
who command them.33 Spouses drugged their husbands, servants and slaves their
mistresses. The impossible role reversal was thus facilitated at least temporarily by
those who suffered, in the words of another French traveler and pharmacist, Jean
Mocquet, "incredible cruelties".34 With each and every travel narrative the description
grew and was fleshed out around datura with more juicy and voyeuristic details of
perverse sex. Thus Laval added a curiosity concerning "all Indian women, gentile andMuslim", who in "company" of men want to be on top and consider any other way a
monstrosity against nature.35
For Orta, the sexual behavior and escapades of his compatriots were of nointerest. What did matter to him were professional codes of conduct. Asked whether
he gave datura seeds to his slaves (negro ou negra) "for fun", he responded that suchan act would go against his consciousness.36 Except when rectifying themisrepresentation concerning elephant mating, no other indecent postures are present
in his text:"Ruano: They say that the male elephant (elefante) sleeps with the female
elephant (elafanta) just like man and woman, contrary to other quadrupeds.
Orta: The contrary is the truth, because they join together like othera scant biographical notes, often in contradiction, see Carvalho, Garcia d'Orta, p. 67; Blunt, W. andRaphael. S., The illustrated herbal, London, 1979 and Lach, Donald, F., Asia in the Making of Europe,
Chicago University Press, Chicago, (1977), 1994, vol. 2, book 3, p. 436-7.
29
Clusius or L’Écluse, Charles de, Aromatum et Simplicium Aliquot Medicamentorum apud Indios
Nascentium Historia, (Antwerpen, 1567), ed. J. Walter, Lisboa, 1964.
30
Costa, p. 88.
31
Linchoten stayed in Goa from 1584 to 1588 employed by the Archbishop Vincente de Fonseca.
32
Linchoten, Jan Huygens van, The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies (fromthe old English translation of 1598, London, 1885), reprint, Madras 1988, vol. 1,[henceforth:
Linschoten] pp. 210-11.
33
Laval, Pyrard de, Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes orientales (1601-1611), Paris, 1998,[henceforth: Laval] vol. 2 , pp. 632-633.
34
Mocquet, Jean, Voyage à Mozambique & Goa; La relation de Jean Mocquet, Paris, 1996, p. 110111.
35
Laval, vol. 2, pp. 631-632.
36
Orta, vol. 1, p. 296.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

8

quadrupeds; they are no different, except that the male gets on the bank which
is higher, and the female is lower."
Obviously, neither women on top (mulier super virum), nor men from behind (retro
canino), were considered as norms in prescribed heterosexual human relations.37 The
suspicion that elephants also practice what came to be known as the missionary
position, is perfectly in tune with their usual anthropomorphic reputation. From theclassical period onwards, the elephant is seen as a mirror image of the European other,of a barbarian. Endowed with an almost, but not quite, human intelligence, it is an
animal-surrogate inscribed within ambiguous and contradictory European desires
either to deny or to confer full humanity on their colonial subjects. According to
Costa's treatise on the elephant appended to his book, this "ugly" animal is endowedwith memory and rudimentary speech, learns easily, is capable of discipline, is a goodand strong worker, and practices some sort of religion (sun worship). It is also
pleasant, modest, bashful, vengeful, prideful and chaste.38 It has, however, one
weakness (enfermedade), it is unable to control his furia venerea, and then becomes a
menace to whoever is in its way. An excess of carnality and frivolity, and a confused
idolatrous religion were proofs of the essential lack.
This is precisely the type of often repeated argument Orta avoided expatiating
upon, insisting rather on rigorously materialist evidence or explanation and "health"projects for the Portuguese in the tropics. Newcomers must change the management
or the "techniques of the body", in words of Marcel Mauss, and thus connect it andadapt it to local climates and environmental habits. The body was to be, in Orta's
view, a locus of accommodation, not conflict, between the European and Asianworlds. The relocation costs would not have a decisive impact on the loss of European
bodily substances, if one were to supplement them immediately with vernacular
additives: different types of food and drink, dress, sleeping habits, sociability, etc.
What this conscientious physician was prescribing was, in fact, already in practice. In
their drive for profit and adventure, Portuguese traders and soldiers tuned their bodies
to fit the rules imposed by an almost permanent "extraterritorial" marketplacesituation. In the Bakhtinian sense, theirs was a "grotesque" body which communicatedfully with the outside world through the orifices: mouth, genital organs, nose, etc.39
Food, Adaptation and Social Solidarity
Since food is necessary to construct this new tropicalized body, the Colóquios
provides a whole range of dainty dishes which evoke exotic tastes through their nonPortuguese names and the familiar pleasures of a richly laid table. Although Orta
refers to his culinary tips as "low things" not worthy to be written about, Ruano
provided a justification and context for his complicated menus: " I am not so much
physician as you fear, because I also consider myself a man of the court".40 Food was
not considered as a low thing at the table of the Governor, a Vicerey, a Jesuit Superiorora simple casado, since, besides its nutritional value, it was considered as animportant sign of status and honor. All social occasions were concluded with banquets
37

Vainfas, Ronaldo, Trópico dos Pecados,; Moral, Sexualidade e Inquisição no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro,
1997, p. 124.
38
Costa, "Tractado del Elephante y de sus calidades", p. 414-448. I have presented some of these ideas
in my article Indian Faces, Bodies and Elephants; Remarks on the Pictorial description of Indian
Mutiny (1857-58) in the Illustrated London News, presented at the Conference organized by the Groupfor the Critical Study of Colonialism, Berkeley, August 1986 (unpublished).
39
Bakhtin, M., Rablais and His World, transl, Cambridge, 1968.
40
Orta, vol. 2, p. 103
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

9of which travelers from other European countries left succulent descriptions. Feeding
the poor, especially poor Portuguese soldiers, during the slack monsoon period inwhich their services were neither required nor remunerated was one of the duties ofthe members of the Misericórdia and other various confraternities.41 Even theprisoners of the aljube and tronco, the ecclesiastical and civil prisons, were regularly
fed and their diets were adjusted according to their specific status, rank, ethnicity.42
Distribution and availability of food in Portuguese settlements, and especially in Goa,
came to be assimilated to a question of civic and civilizational, Christian superiority
vis-à-vis the surrounding non-Christian political structures. Eating, and eating well,according to Ruano, was a courtly privilege and duty. Another of the soldier's was topreserve his own health, but at the same time his healthy bodies was the concern andduty of the state, which sponsored health-care institutions. Hospitals andMisericórdias, fashioned on the metropolitan model, for examples the Hospital Realde Todos os Santos and the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Lisbon, both established in
the last decade of the fifteenth century, appeared throughout Asia. Royalcentralization and state regulation were at the heart of these two institutions,considered today as an original and early "Portuguese model" of social welfare.43
Although the descriptions of the organization and the conditions of health care in thehospitals vary, the writers all agreed that the food served in them was of excellent
quality. In the Hospital del Rey in Goa, poultry and various meats were cooked,
boiled, grilled and garnished with bread and rice, before the meal was concluded withfruit and sweets.44 In the early years, staying in the hospital seems to have been more
comfortable for many poor soldiers than starving at home, if one had one at all.
According to Gaspar Correa, Vasco da Gama discontinued the practice of keeping, forreasons of "friendship" (recolhião homens por amizades), those men in the hospital
who had injured themselves in drunken quarrels over women.45
However, friendship and commensalism among men were important
promoters of solidarity and community. Besides reinforcing horizontal ties andcooperation, transactions in food acted as indicators of vertical social relations. One of
the social techniques of the colonial or "vice-royal" courtly lifestyle was to givebanquets for stately, festive or religious occasions with a few hundred invitees, mostly
fidalgoes and soldiers. In the middle of the sixteenth century, however, a regular mealat least four times a week was given as a charitable act to impoverished Portuguese
men in Goa.46 "To give table (dar mesa)" was one of the prerogatives of the governor
or a viceroy, and it was imitated lower down the hierarchy. In the course of the timeand by the end of the sixteenth century, charitable acts at the table of the viceroy seem

41

On the institution of Misericórdia, a unique Portuguese state solution to the growing public welfare

concerns see, Correia, Fernando da Silva, Origens e Formação das Misericórdias Portuguesas, (Lisbon, 1944), 2nded. Lisbon, 1999. Martins, José Frederico Ferreira, História da Misericórdia de Goa, 3 vols., Nova Goa, 1910.
42

Dellon, Charles, L'inquisition de Goa; La relation de Charles Dellon (1687), ed. Amiel Ch. And
Lima A., Paris, 1997.
43
Ferreira, Coriolano, "Institutions for Health Care and the Overseas Diffusion of the Portuguese
Model", in The Great Maritime Discoveris and World Health, eds. Mário Gomes Marques and John
Cule, Lisbon, 1991, pp. 105-115.
44
Laval, vol. 2, p.531-532.
45
Correa, Lendas, vol. II, p. 819. See also Fonseca, José Nicolau da, An Historical and Archeological
Sketch of the City of Goa, (Bombay, 1878), New Delhi reprint, 1994, p.229.
46
Gaspar Barzaeus to the confreres in Coïmbra, Goa, Dec. 13, 1548, Archivum Romanum Societatis
Iesu (henceforth: ARSI), Epp.N.N.78, ff.184v-185r. See my unpublished paper, " 'Fervors' and Tropics: a
Jesuit Missionary Career in India (António Gomes, 1548-1554)" presented at the conference in Paris, Histoire
culturelle et histoire sociale: les missions religieuses dans le monde ibérique, May 25-27, 2000
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

10

to have been completely replaced by an occasional theatrical display of the local
courtly empowerment.47
Orta's text is also a display of empowerment, not over men and social
relations, but over things and names. Most of the things are edibles (or consumables)
and all of them are mercantile goods. On a few occasions, his learned interlocutors,
Ruano and Dimas Bosque, the two Spanish physicians, exchanged with Orta bothwords and food simultaneously. The mixture of words and food mobilized in Ruano's
opinion the "four senses", which facilitated a final professional judgement without
passing through a learned, written opinion of the pharmacological or botanicalclassics. After tasting jangamas from Orta's Bombay garden, Ruano knew that theysmelled good, looked like small sorb apples (sorvas), taste like plums and are weresour (estitiquas). The truth about things, Orta's primary goal, takes leave of text andvoice and turns to palates and then back into the field of knowledge. Within the same
movement, analogies with European botanical species provide the approximate
meanings and tastes. This frequently used technique for grasping the new and strange
is not employed to undermine local tastes in favor of the metropolitan varieties. On
the contrary, it is locally grown plants that Orta defines as possessing better qualities,
such as, for example prickly fruits (oranges, lemons, citrons). In so doing, he was wellaware that he could be seen as nourishing "unpatriotic" ideas. "It is certain that there
are some very persistent Portuguese who would rather die than confess that here there
are some fruits equal to those in Portugal."48 Hence, a plethora of indigenized recipes
function as sensory persuasion.
Mango, the most valued fruit, can be eaten in sugar syrup, in vinegar, in oiland salt, filled with ginger and garlic, cooked and salted. In addition to thesevernacular preparations, Orta added a Portuguese invention - sliced mango in strongscented wine.49 In the same way, plants and herbs serving mainly as condiments were
pushed on the readers' palates and on what he called imaginative faculties (virtude
imaginativa) in order to evoke the same alloy of tropical and European. Thus ginger
could be eaten in achar (pickle), in salad or in fish or meat turn-over (pasteis depeixe) or in sugar syrup.50 Especially the Friday fish dish could be improved by"adding taste", Orta suggested in one of his very few remarks concerning Christianreligion and practices. From other sources, especially foreign travelers who visitedGoa, it appears that the Portuguese creole diet abounded in meat and fish prepared insauce, garnished with the famous mango pickle and a fair quantity of rice.51 In thelate seventeenth century, an English physician, John Fryer, paints almost an idyllic
domestic scene of a typical Goan household:"They [women] sing, and play on the Lute, make Confections, pickle Achars,(the best mango Achars coming from them), and dress Meat exquisitely, not to
put the Stomach to too much trouble, but such as shall digest presently;
Supoes, Pottages, and varieties of Stews, in little China Dishes or Plates,
which they shift before you are cloy'd and at common Entertainment alter halfa dozen Modes: Their Relishing Bits have not the Fieriness of ours, yet all the47

Santos, Catarina Madeira, "Goa é a chave de toda a Índia", Perfil político da capital do Estado da Índia
(1505-1570), Lisbon, 1999, p. 228-231

48

Orta, vol. 2, p. 99.
Orta, vol. 2, p. 102. Wine was an imported item. See Laval: vin de passe vol. 2, 596.
50
Orta, vol. 2, p. 5-11.
51
Linschoten, vol. 1, p. 267.
49

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

11

pleasure you can desire; and to speak truly, I prefer their ordinary way ofordering Victuals before any others."52
Food and women are inextricably woven together in most "tropical" travel literature.
Scarcity or availability of both makes all the difference for the poetics of theencounter.53 Like Fryer, Francesco Carletti experienced and appreciated theabundance. Especially, the abundance of domestic and wild fowl in the Goan diet.
Prepared in numerous ways, cooked, backed and stewed in sugar on white rice, thesedishes were delectable, astonishing, cheap to buy and tasty.54 The same could be, andwas said for women. Carletti compares them to Boccaccio's free and passionate
heroines who would rather die for love and amorous encounters than give them up.
The proverb on their lips, often heard, was "more than death" (mais que morrer),
which under the circumstances was quite appropriate, since adultery for a woman was
punishable by just that, death.55 His admiration for their courage in passion, since"there is not a single day without a man killing his wife", blends with his admirationfor exquisite dishes.
"Among the recipes, I will only mention the one called 'royal dish', preparedwith capon's meat , first cooked, boiled or roasted, which is cut in very small
pieces and then incorporated with pounded almonds, sugar, amber, musc,
crushed pearls, rose water and egg yolk; the mixture which refreshes andexcites again the lovers to the carnal pleasures."56
If the consumption of food was to stimulate "union", solidarity and cooperation, sex,
on the other hand was divisive, disruptive, transgressive and had to be controlled. The
French royal apothecary, Jean Mocquet, was scandalized with sex crimes in Goa andthe cruelty with which they were executed. Jealous wives tortured and disfigured
young slave girls, men raped and murdered their lovers and wives, women poisoned
their husbands, etc.57 The tortures which were applied competed in ingeniousness andexoticism with the popular contemporary books on "religious" cruelty – from martyrsof the primitive church to wars of religion.58
The purpose of the Colóquios, which was printed in Goa and for Goans unlike the disparaging descriptions of the foreign travelogues destined for theEuropean audience -, is not to expose, but to dispose of the perils of Portuguese lifein the tropics. Each and every item in his titanic inventory of Asian flora and minerals
serves to help human bodies, male bodies in particular, to preserve and gain health,longevity and virility. If the climatic conditions drain the bodies of their fluids (sperm,
water, urine, sweat, diarrhea, etc.), or provoke the rotting of food and nourishingsubstances in the bodily cavities, the local natural pharmacopoeia provides the means
52

Roe, Thomas and Fryer, John, Travels in India in the Seventeenth Century, (London, 1873), New
Delhi reprint, 1993 p. 384. Commissariat, M.S., Mandelslo's Travels in Western India (1638-1639),(London, 1931), New Delhi, reprint, 1995, p. 79
53
See a "transcription" of a dialogue concerning the custom of "swapping women" among the merchantcommunities in Malabar as recorded by and 15th-century Italian traveler.. p. 59. Varthema, Ludovico,
The Travel of Ludovico di Vartema, transl. by J. Winter Jones, ed. by G. P. Badge. (London, 1863),
New Delhi reprint, 1997. On Vartema's travels in South India see, Rubiés, Joan-Pau, Travel andEthnology in the Renaissance; South India through European Eyes, 1250-1625,Cambridge, 2000, pp.
125-164.
54
Carletti, Francesco, Voyage autour du Monde de Francesco Carletti (1594-1606), [hencforth:
Carletti] Paris, 1999. p. 249. See also, Carletti, Francesco, Ragionamento del mio viaggio intorno al
mondo, ed. G. Silvestro, Torino, 1958.
55
Carletti, p. 255.
56
Carletti, p. 256
57
58

Moquet, Jean, Voyage à Mozambique & Goa; La relation de Jean Mocquet, Paris, 1996 p. 104-122.
See, Verstegan, Richard, Théâtre des cruautés des hérétiques de notre temps, ed. Frank Lestringant, Paris, 1995,
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

12

for regeneration. Following Galen's theory of primary qualities and the complexionate
balance between passive (dry and wet) and active (hot and cold) qualities inherent in
the simples, the medicine depended on counterbalancing the patient's disorder, the socalled cure by contraries.59 Hence, the dialectics between ingestion and expulsion, inorder to stabilize the balance of the four humors, syncopates Orta's text. Thus, withina few lines, a recipe for a delicious food will be followed by advice on how to purge
the bowls with an appropriate clyster. Similarly, a watermelon (pateca) is praised for
its exquisite taste and for its diuretic, vermifuge, anti-fever, somniferous effects.
"It is one of the best fruits that I've seen in my life; and at certain times I prefer
it to our melons (melões); […] and most of it seems to be evacuated in urine
and some in diarrhea (câmaras); and no thing remains subjected to corruption(corrução), as it happens with melons and cucumbers (pepinos e
cogombros)."60
For Orta's Goan audience, it must have been quite reassuring to find that the goods
easily procured on the local market had such various uses. He also prescribedwatermelon (melam da India or pateca) for choleric fevers, to warm up liver andkidneys.
Physicians, Quacks and Confessors
While Orta was incurably optimistic about nature's ability to provide cures andremedies for all the worst diseases and ailments, he was suspicious of the medical
specialists ( médicos, sangradores, boticários, dais, curandeiros) one encountered inGoa. Whether they were Arabs, Gentiles, Coraçones, Jews, Spaniards or Portuguese,
for a majority of them money and easy enrichment won over their sense of
professional ethics. Regardless of their "ethnicity", there were illustrious exceptions,such as Ruano, Dimas Bosque and a few other doctors whom Orta encountered at thevarious native courts in the Deccan and on the Malabar Coast. However, his
judgements of other specialists is never submerged or short-circuited by way of readymade generalizations or "ethnic" or "religious" stereotyping.61 Human beings withwhom he interacted are defined according to their moral qualities or their humoral
temperament. They can be brave, cowardly, avaricious, generous, choleric,melancholic, etc., but they are not avaricious because they are Jews, brave because
Portuguese or cruel because Muslim, as Orta's Catholic contemporaries seem to haveperceived members of other religions.
Dispersed in his text are all kinds of villains and heroes, learned physicians
and quacks from all camps. Just as he proceeded with an identification of medicinal
plants, he also identified doctors and healers without any preconceived cultural orsocial blinders. Most of all, he underscored at every point the usefulness of crossing
over, borrowing from one another, exchanging prescriptions, adapting to situations,climates, regions or individual bodies. "A shoemaker does not make identical shoes
for everyone" is one of Orta's chosen Galenic dictums.62 This is one of the reasons
why his text lacks a unified, fixed methodological framework. He even refused to59

The strength of the simple, which might be predominantly hot and wet was quantified on a scalefrom temperate (neutral) to the fourth degree.
60
Orta, vol, 2, p. 135
61
The exception, perhaps out of precaution, is his treatment of a Lutheran botanist Leonard Fuchs.
Orta, vo.l379-380. Also the inhabitants of São Lourenço considered very barbarous. Orta, vol. 1, p.
203.
62
Orta, vol. 1, p. 141
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris13

follow the simplest mechanical arrangement of his chapters in alphabetical order for
rhetorical reasons. In order to capture the attention of his audience, the most beneficial(proveitosas) things had to be said first, because he heard that "the worst sins have to
be confessed first to the confessor."63 Intentionally or not, Orta likened his audience toconfessors, some of whom would ultimately turn into inquisitors. To what extent thisfurtive sentence was a particular captatio benevolentiae, a simple premonition, a
fetish against the evil eye, cannot be discerned. That he was successful in the
beginning irrespective of his intention is proved by the fact that the imprimatur of thebook in 1563 was given by the first Goan Inquisitor, Aleixo Dias Falcão.
On the other hand, there is a natural connection between his botanicopharmacological treatise and confession, as they both turn around the discourse oftruth and the truth in discourse, according to Michel Foucault's famous dictum. And
yet, Orta had to hide more than he could ever reveal. Not only because he actually
had something to hide, but because he and all the New Christians in Goa were foreversuspected of hiding the fact that they were still Judaizers and enemies of Christians. In
this strange position in which everybody knew everything, and inversely everybody
hid everything, and in which the roles of each and every person were defined by the
purity of his/her blood, the Colóquios can be read as a piece of anti-Inquisitorialpropaganda. The confessor and the Inquisitor were supposed to uncover difference,label it as sinful and annihilate it. To this exclusive method, Orta opposes an eclectic
herbarium of plants and people, all of whom, although labeled with so many names indifferent languages, preserved the essential qualities of natural or human beings. Noneof them deemed to be superfluous, but rather is seen as contributing to the ecodiversity.
"And since the region was never so well-known as in the present, especially by
the Portuguese, do not believe that there is a lack of famous remedies, because
plants and fruits were never so many as they are today; because the grafting(enxertias) produces diversity among fruits, and because the transport fromone land to another also produces diversity".64
With this Darwinian insight avant la lettre concerning the variability of the species,
Orta imagines the "new" world without ecological and thus without political borders.
Free exchanges of goods, plants and people were to be regulated according to themechanism of supply and demand. Thus, the available quantity of coconuts lowers its
price in Goa, while its scarcity in the interior, in Balagate [Ahmednagar], makes ithigher.65 Absolute scarcity, on the other hand, may produce the effect of monopoly,for example, such as the famous (and imaginary) "anti-venomous" coconut from theMaldives, supposedly the fruit of giant underwater trees, which was exclusively theproperty of the king. As Orta put it, "this gives to the coquo of the islands moreauthority (autoridade)".66 However, the ideal world in his opinion was one of travel
and exchange. This is why he complaind about not being able to obtain permission toleave Goa and Portuguese territory in search of information concerning medical
practices and remedies, and in order to get farther away from the ominous shadow of
the Inquisition, one might suspect.67 His dreamland seems to have been China which
once sent its merchant fleets, loaded with silk, porcelain, musk, pearls, copper, etc. all63

Orta, vol. 1, p. 23
Orta, vol. 1, p. 203. Another Darwinian insight, p. 210.
65
Orta, vol. 1, p. 238.
66
Orta, vol. 1, p. 243.
67
Orta, vol.
64

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris14

the way to Ormuz.68 It had tantalized Portuguese and Europeans, for that matter, fromthe inception of the "discoveries" era, and by the middle of the sixteenth century,
reports full of admiration, if somewhat tainted by the hostility encountered, percolated
down to Goa. The pharmacists Tomé Pires, Galeote Pereira and Fernão Mendes Pinto,among the first, must have already stimulated the appetites and enthusiasm for
Chinese things.69 What impressed Orta more than anything, except the mercantile and"mechanical" skills of the Chinese, such as the invention of the printing press, was thefact that "they give grades and many honors to the literati, and they are the ones who
govern the king and the country".70 This being one of the ideals of the classical res
publica, it continued to thrive in all utopian literature, culminating with the French
Enlightenment philosophers. Besides Orta, the Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth andthe seventeenth centuries, were responsible in more important ways for heralding themost positive sides of the Chinese political system, especially compared to European
regimes.
Beyond utopia, on his own ground in Goa, Orta dealt with local literati anddoctors. He wrote that he learnt a lot from the "great physicians", Arabs andCoraçones [Khorassani], whom he encountered at the court of Nizamoxa [Nizam
Shah].71 However, on a daily basis, local physicians, Muslim hakims and Hindu
vaidyas, were not dissimilar from Portuguese doctors in their healing methods and intheir unprofessional and avaricious behavior. Thus, the vaidyas used Portuguese
remedies in order "to please people" and "earn more money". Although they avoided
blood-letting, they imitated the Portuguese in checking urine but with no idea as to
how to proceed, and "of the anatomy, they don't know where the liver or spleen, or
anything is".72 In a word, they cured "by experience and by custom", and it was
precisely that which Orta studied and amply used in his medical practice. Asked if he"took some things [remedies] from them", Orta replied, "Yes, many; but first I try
remedies of our doctors, and when they do not work, I take those of the Brahmans of
the country".73 This is a curious statement given that not all doctors in Goa were
Brahmans and that Orta had no access to the classical medical Sanskrit texts such as
the Suśrutasamhitā and the Carakasamhitā.74 It is possible, however, that he suspectedor even had some notion of the existence of such books since, on the wings of theCounter-reformation, the Catholic clergy and the Jesuits had began to confiscate
manuscripts from the Brahmans of Chorão, Divar and other surrounding villages.75
Nevertheless, as many "intellectuals" after him, such as the Jesuit missionaries
themselves, Orta admired, respected and often futilely searched for the comprehensive
local literate tradition and their "honest" exponents. In the long run, it became an
68

Orta, vol. 1, p. 205-207,
Pereira, Galiote, Algumas cousas sabidas da China, ed. Rui Manuel Loureiro, Lisbon, CNCDP,
1992; Pinto, Fernão Mendes, Peregrinação, Lisbon, 1998; Pires, Tomé, The Suma Oriental, transl. anded. by Armando Cortesão, Haklyt, London, 1944, reprint, New Delhi, 1990.
70
Orta, vol. 1, p. 260.
71
Orta, vol. II, p.136. He taught the king Latin words for the remedies and the king taught him Arabic.
He talks about great Gentile doctors, but it does not seem that he had much contact with them. Orta,
vol. 2, p. 139.
72
Orta, vol. 2, p. 137-8;
73
Orta, vol. 2, p. 139.
74
Carakasamhitā, with an English trans., Jamnagar, 1949, 6 vols. See also Filliozat, Jean, La doctrineclassique de la médicine indienne, Paris, 1949.
75
See the letter by Frey Juan d'Albuquerque to João III, Goa, Nov. 28, 1548, AN/TT, Corpo
Cronológico, 2-241-90. 1548. The bishop Juan de Albuquerque gave the books to the Jesuit, António
Gomez.
69

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

15

impossible task, but the that belief the Brahmans hold the keys to all Indian sciences
remained.
Rot and the demonic in colonial culture
In spite of such lofty goals such as acquiring and perfecting knowledge oftropical flora, fauna, geography, linguistics and the like, the most pressing task for adoctor, which Orta never forgot, was saving lives through successful cures of the mostcommon, yet deadly, illnesses such as fevers and diarrhea (câmara).76 Following
closely the Galenic humoral theory, all diseases were attributed to the disturbance ofhumors outside and inside the body: bad air, caused by piles of dead animal carcases,
excrement or garbage, or undigested food in one's own stomach. Public and personal
hygiene were directly responsible for the state of one's body and for the outbreak ofgeneral epidemics. According to the contemporary accounts, the stench in the city of
Goa was quite unbearable because of the unsanitary practices, for example, leaving
excrement on the roof of the houses to be cleaned by wind, rain, birds or ants.77 Evenwell-to-do households had no toilets and their refuse was disposed of by Bhangis, allbelonging to a special caste of sweepers and chamber-pot bearers.78 Village life wasno better and, according to one Jesuit missionary, the peasants lived in pigsties.79
The tropics in general were considered as regions in which rot anddecomposition were endemic in both the ecological and moral senses. "You should
know that this land, at least along the coast, is too prone to putrefaction", explained
Orta to his readers. The rot was thus viewed as a climatic, not as a social and culturalfact, as if the land itself produced vapors stimulating the decay of things andinstitutions, such as their own Estado da Índia, as the Portuguese came to believe inthe second half of the sixteenth century. Rot was inherent to the tropics just as thedwellers of such places, according to the humoral theory, had an increased sense of
smell. They spent huge amounts of money for perfumes, ointments and fragrant
flowers, according to Duarte Barbosa and many other contemporary travelers.80 The
reverse side of this olfactory paradise was that they equally cherished, according toPortuguese taste, malodorous things such as asafetida. Orta's little story is quite
instructive in this respect and spells out clearly his and his compatriots' taste:"A Portuguese in Vijayanagara had a very valuable horse which kept on
breaking wind, and the king did not want to buy it from him. The Portuguese
cured it by feeding it this ymgu with flour. The king bought it as soon as it was
healthy and asked him how he had cured it. And he told him about ymgu. To
this the king said, do not be surprised, because this is the food of the gods, oras the poets say the nectar. The Portuguese lowered his voice and responded in
Portuguese that it should better be called the grub of the demons." 81
76

Orta, vol. 2, p. 374, vol.1, 156..
Fryer, p. 152. See also Gracias, Fátima da Silva, Health & Hygiene in Colonial Goa, 1510-1961,
New Delhi, 1994, p. 68.
78
The name derived from bhang, an intoxicating liquid made of hashish. See Yule, H. and Burnell,
A.C., Hobson-Jobson, (London 1903), [henceforth: Hobson-Jobson], New Delhi, 1979, p.129. Orta,
vol. 1, pp. 95-100.
77

79

Duarte Leitão to the members of the Portuguese province, Goa, Nov. 16. 1570, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon,
Fundo Geral, 4532, f. 81v.

80

Orta, vol.1, p. 71, p. 73-74. Oriental kings love flowers. Persian ambassador ’ Abd al-Razzāk also
talks about it. See Quatremere, E.M. (ed.), Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque duRoi, vol. XIV, part 1, Paris, 1843.
81
Orta, vol. 1, p. 81. Hīngu in Hindi.
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16

Filled with signs (rather signifiers) of foul smells, this particular passage juxtaposes
people and animals, divine and demonic, and food and filth in the most syncretic
mixture without endeavoring to exclude one or the other. Orta took a personal standon asafetida - "a thing that for me smells worst in the world" -, but allowed his text tolead us to olfactory relativism. Natives (gente desta terra) enjoy its smell and even a
Portuguese merchant found it delicious in certain vegetable preparations by the
Baneanes [Gujarati merchants]. The medicinal properties of asafetida were many andimportant - against rage, plage, poison, constipation, flatulence, lack of appetite, etc.
Thus by the end the colloquy, when Orta contradicted the opinion of Ruelius
concerning its anti-aphrodisiac virtues and insisted that "everybody writes about it asnever letting the member down", this otherwise quite mysterious plant, as nobody
could figure out how it looked and from where it came, was fully rehabilitated.82
The connection between foul and/or inebriating smells, devilry and women,
however, is not accidental. It was precisely because of the smell produced by tropicalnature and the enhanced olfactory capacities of the Indians that they "are all inclined
to Venus".83 There is a discursive vicious circle that brings Orta's various "scientific"
prescriptions and enunciations to purposely or unwittingly connect women with
illness, food, rot, and social disorders. Thus the causes of the morxi (or passio
colerica), considered the most virulent and mortal illness, were excessive eating,excessive "conversation with women", and "it occurred mostly in June and July(which is the winter in this land)".84 The illness, clinically described in detail by Ortaand confirmed by other travelogues, which in the eighteenth century under French
vocalic and semantic distortion came to be known as mort-de-chien [Dog's Death], is
generally known as epidemic Asiatic cholera.85 The patient would usually die withintwenty four hours, dehydrated, exhausted and in excruciating pain. The ultimate
remedies suggested in the Colóquios were as painful as they were inefficient,resembling more a torture than a cure: branding the soles of the feet with a burning
hot iron "and throwing in the [patient's] eyes a long pepper in order to test theforce".86 These were methods adopted from the "native physicians" and considered by
Orta as appropriate. In addition, he proposed a cocktail of spices and oily massages
which resembled ayurvedic treatments and, what is more, had his own curious
theriaca mixture containing, among other things, opium and exotic and medicinallyindifferent materials such as unicornio and the bezoar stone. 87
Orta's Colóquios is an entirely open text, just as Orta is an open-mindedstudent of nature. He may have ridiculed certain practices by native medical
specialists, such as Gujaratis and Deccani who healed fevers without medicinal
remedies, but by starving their patients for up to fifteen days.88 Nevertheless, he wasalways ready to try new methods, as long as they did not contradict reason and his
sense of medical ethics. Thus, he was reluctant to try certain alleged antidotes, forexample, the mysterious giant water coconut from the islands of the Maldives, as he82

Orta, vol. 1, p. 76, p. 86
Orta, vol. 1, p. 70
84
Orta, vol. 1, p. 264. Mordexin [morexim, etc.] for cholera comes from Konkani verb moîxi whichmeans to collapse, to fall. Dalgado, Sebastião Rodolfo, Glossário Luso-Asiático, Coimbra, 1919, vol. 2,
pp. 69-71.
85
See Hobson-Jobson, p. 586-7 for travelers' descriptions.
86
Orta, vol. 1, p. 265.
87
Orta , p. vol. 1, p. 265. Ficalho, Conde de, Garcia da Orta e o Seu Tempo, (Lisbon, 1886), Lisbon
reprint, 1983, p. 313-322. Boxer, Charles, “Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine Garcia d'Orta andNicolás Monardes”, in Diamante, 14, 1963, pp. 1-33.
88
Orta, vol, 2, p. 140.
83

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

17thought that there were many other good simples and preparations.89 His writing
resembles picaresque traveling from one part of the earth to the other with utter
disregard of frontiers, customs officers and passports. China, Brazil, Persia, or any
other geographical region, appear in his text to be connected by underground passages
in which etymology, trade, illnesses, plants, people and, what he did not know, germs,
circulated, enriching the knowledge of the world. The rhythm of acquisition ofknowledge had accelerated in an unprecedented manner since, according to Orta, in
his own time, the Portuguese knew in one day more than the Romans in hundredyears.90 In a similar fashion another Renaissance figure, João de Barros, Orta's
contemporary and a famous grammarian, continued to compare the Portuguese to theancient Romans. However, while he envisioned and desired linguistic conquest, thatis, capturing foreign words, although ultimately imposing the Portuguese language
even in the "Indian temples", Orta appropriated foreign things and words, not to build
an empire but to consume them.91 The consumption of things and words was meant tosupport and cure individual bodies – be they Portuguese, Muslim, Gujarati, Brahman,
Baneanes, etc.
Orta's was an empire of humors and his claim to authority reposed on theability to keep them in check, in spite of the fact that "every day there [were] newillnesses".92 And to prove that his task was worthy of effort, he invoked divine help asconfirmation. Regarding the appearance of syphilis he said,"God is so charitable that in every country he gave us the remedy to cure it;
because the one who gives the illness gives the remedy for it; if not, as
Temistio said, our knowledge is the smallest part of what we do not know.
And since we do not know remedies in order to cure all of them [illnesses], webring ruibarbo from China, from where we bring páo or raizes for curing
sarna de Castella [i.e. syphilis], and cana fistola we bring from India, andmanná from Persia and guaiacam from the West Indies".93
The boundary between natural and supernatural remains permeable and the divine(and demonic, for that matter) signposts seem to be randomly scattered over the faceof the earth. It was up to courageous adventurers to collect them and bring them all toserve one and the same purpose - healing the ailing body. A soldier (and/or merchantand/or traveler) was an exemplary syphilitic body, both victim and carrier of thedisease. According to Orta, the boubas which betrayed the infection were notconsidered shameful in Goa. Moreover, they were a cause of boasting among the local"studs".94 Some of the reasons for taking this illness lightly were that in the first stage
it appeared curable, it had spread with record speed throughout Europe and its
colonies, and it was considered to be a providential illness, displaying divine wrathand cured by divine mercy. Medical explanations, based on the idea that the primarycause was God's will, were reassuring and placed both the physicians and the patientsin a symmetrical world of preternatural axles and pulleys.
Orta's exuberant, appetizing and soft-spoken textual crescendo reveals much,
but hides even more. His exchanges with ayurvedic and yunani medical specialists
confirmed his Galenic humoral view that human bodies were basically adaptable
89

Orta, vol. 1, p. 241.
Orta, vol. 1, p. 210.
91
Barros, João de, Gramática da Língua Portuguesa; Cartinha, Gramática, Diálogo em Louvor da
Nossa Linguagem e diálogo da Viciosa Vergonha,ed. by Maria Leonor Carvalhão Buescu, Lisbon,
1971, p. 405.
92
Orta, vo. 1, p. 179.
93
Orta, vol. 1, p. 179. Themistio was a friend of Julius the Apostate and the commentator of Aristotle.
94
Laval, vol. 2, p. 535-6.
90

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

18

natural machines, fuelled on natural products such as plants, spices, minerals, andmeats. Extracting nourishing substances from whichever ecological zone, and adifficult tropical climate is no exception, and ingesting them in order to tune one's
body to the environmental habitat was the most important factor in maintaining
health. He did, nevertheless, understand that health is also a psychological and social
phenomenon. It is an inalienable property of the self which makes the subject
identical to him/herself. Illness would then be something like a theft or a loss ofproperty, alienation of the self. The physician is therefore a judge or a mediator in therecovery of an estranged property. Orta's model of healing was negotiation, that is,establishing an efficient interpersonal relation between the physician and the patient.
It can also be called winning over the patient's trust and confidence in one's healing
method. Precisely around the time he was working on and publishing his Colóquios,
this trust was somewhat broken and fissured.
Perceptions of Tropical Decadence
From the time Orta arrived in Goa, in 1534, until 1563, the situation had, haseven in the eyes of his contemporaries, changed from worse to crisis. Two
inextricably connected problems were identified. The first was financial andeconomic, the second moral. Financial problems of the Estado da Índia multiplied
and were reported back home by various historical actors. The most coherent andpersuasive among these reports were letters by the royal financial supervisor, Simão
Botelho, written between 1547 and 1552, and his Tombo do Estado Índia. Thissituation of a real resource crunch and moral degradation came to be enshrined, fromthe last quarter of the sixteenth century, in the literature of decadência, the decline,
which appears to have been a broad historiographical trend, as much among
Portuguese, as among Ottoman and Mughal historians.95 However, even before thepre-eminent historian of Portuguese decline, Diogo do Couto (1543-1616), for whom,
in fact, the decadência theory served as a screen for a merciless critique of thepresent, the golden age myth of the early period of Albuquerque's rule had been
already formulated in1569 by the Archbishop of Goa, D. Jorge Temudo (15671571).96
Something had gone viciously wrong with Estado da Índia and thePortuguese, according to Temudo. Christian faith, justice and good customs were allin danger of being irreparably lost, without a profound "reformation (reformação)".
He portrayed a political system based on financial corruption, violence andlawlessness. Moreover, from captains to governors, they were ready "to favor
infidels" in order to satiate their greed and their personal interests. Among the mostpernicious customs that came under the Archbishop's merciless condemnation was
idleness (ouciosidade), which led to concupiscence and finally to the loss of martial
warrior virility, so much extolled during Albuquerque's conquest of infidel territories
and necessary for the defense of the Estado.97
Orta's medical knowledge acquired from non-Christian physicians and, as hehimself admitted, especially intended to help men and women in sexual encounters
95

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700; A Political and Economic
History, Longman, London and New York, 1993, p. 107. See also Fleischer, Cornell H., Bureaucrat
and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire. The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541-1600), Princeton, 1986.
96
Wicki, José, S.J., "Duas Relações sobre a situação da Índia Portuguesa nos anos de 1568 e 1569", Studia , no.
8, Lisbon 1961, pp. 123-221.
97
Vertu is etimologically related to vir (Lat. male person).
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

19(coito), seems particularly out of place in Temudo's scheme of national regeneration.
What was needed was efficient policing geared to reform the body of society, rather
than a herbal remedy to cure an individual body. In 1569, when Temudo wrote his
letter, Orta had been dead for a year and his sister Catarina and the other members of
the family came under attack from the Inquisition. Under torture, they all admitted
that he had been a crypto-Jew, which led to his post-humous process and the auto-dafé of 1580.98 And one thing was certain, by 1569 the New Christian physicians, likeOrta, who were the majority among the European-trained medical practitioners, were
mostly discredited in Goa.
The persecution of the New Christians in Goa was both a belated reflex of theInquisitorial clean-up in Portugal and a specific local situation in which a combinationof various factors seem to have enhanced each other more than anywhere else in thePortuguese colonies: the financial and political crisis of at the middle of the sixteenth
century; the arrival of the Jesuits and other religious specialists, armed with acombative post-Tridentine Catholic vision, supported by the Portuguese crown; aspecific colonial situation with various non-Chrisitan peoples under its jurisdiction;
the opulence and success of New Christian merchant communities and their suspected
ties with other Jewish merchants; the sense of an ambiguous, both desirable anduncomfortable, distance from the European world and the emergence of a xenophobic
mentality arising from the minority standing of the Portuguese in the large society inIndia and Asia. All these reasons, spelled out clearly or unself-consciously, would be
ultimately funneled into the grind of the Goan Inquisition.
Read against the background of mounting persecution, Orta's book was a final
and heroic effort to turn the tide of history backwards. In the same year, 1563, allBrahmans and other gentile physicians (medicos gentios),"who were prejudicial toChristianity" were ordered to leave Goa within a month.99 The first Church Councilof Goa, held in 1567, issued a prohibition against allowing non-Christian physicians,
midwives (dais or daya) and barbers to cure or shave Christian patients or clients.100
How inefficient or lightly were these prohibitions taken comes out clearly from
subsequent, even stronger, interdictions issued by the Third (1585), Fourth (1592) and
Fifth (1606) Church Councils.101 Even if these laws "for conversion and in favor of
Christianity (sobre a conversão e favor da Christandade)" targeted the gentile andinfidel doctors and paramedics, the New Christians were considered to be more
pernicious for Christian health.102 As the Inquisition started its deadly spiral ofdenouncement, confessions, judgements and auto-da-fés, fears of New Christian
revenge for the violence wrought on them multiplied accusations and fed into theinquisitorial machine. As a passionate Archbishop, Gaspar de Leão Pereira, wrote to
the Jews in his Letter of the Archbishop of Goa to the People of Israel who still follow
98

Reportorio geral de tres mil oito centos processos, que sam todos os despachados neste sancto
Officio de Goa, & mais partes da India do anno de Mil & quinhentos & secenta & hum, que começou odito sancto Officio atè o anno de Mil & seis centos & vinte & tres, cõ a lista dos Inquisidores que tem
sido nelle, & dos autos publicos da Fee, que se tem celebrado na dita CIDADE de GOA. Feito pellolicenciado Joaõ Delgado Figueryra do Dezembergo da sua Magestade, Promotor & Deputado do dito
sancto Officio. Sendo Iquisidores os senhores Francisco Borges de Souza & Joaõ Fernandes deAlmeida, ANO de M.DC.XXII, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Res. Cod. 203, fl.360v.
99
Carta do V. Rey Dom Francisco Coutinho, Conde do Redondo, mandando comprir outra da Sua
Alteza para lançar fora de suas terras os bramanes e gentios,que impedem a christandade, in Rivara,
J.H. da Cunha, Archivo Portugues Oriental [henceforth: APO], (Nova Goa, 1865), New Delhi reprint,
Fasc. 5/2, p. 543-545.
100
O Primeiro Concilio Provincial celebrado em Goa no Anno de 1567, in APO, fasc.4, p.25.
101
APO, fasc. 4, pp. 132,176, 263-265.
102
APO, Fax. 5/2, p. 543-545.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

20

the Law of Moses and the Talmud because of the deception and the maliciousness of
their Rabbis, printed in Goa 1565 as a preface to the translation of another fifteenthcentury homily against Judaism written by a physician and converted Jew, Hieronimo
da Sancta Fe:
Is there any other infirmity & greater misadventure than yours? It lasts already two
thousand years, & two thousand millions of souls died of this illness. The proper
time for remedy has expired, in which a great number of your ancestors cured
themselves and profited from the doctor (medico) when he came, & and those were
the principals (principaes) of the early Church. You remained sick, suspicious of
all doctors, the law tells that you will die of this infirmity […]. The prophets thinkof you as dead, although long ago they prophesized your health".103
Judaism was an illness which had to be cured is the point Dom Gaspar Leão Pereira,made as if talking directly to the Jews. Printed in the same press two years after Orta's
Colóquios, one of its aims might have been to dwarf any special claim to medical
expertise by the New Christian doctors. Christian faith is the only remedy, Christ is
the ultimate doctor of souls (médico das almas).
Building Trust: Jesuit Medical Mission
Orta's mid-sixteenth-century celebration of the secular, ever adaptable worldof Portuguese overseas colonies, which turned out to be mostly the stuff of his own
dream-work, gave way in the second half of the century to a different definition of"medical" service and to a different solution for curing the ailments of Portuguese
Catholicism in the tropics. Unlike Orta, who trusted only his own eyes, his own taste
and touch and based his medical experience as much as possible on observing local
illnesses and local remedies, the members of the Society of Jesus, the "doctors ofsouls", arrived in India (1542) with a more coherent and efficient, but also blinding,sheaf of prefabricated rules, regulations and mental frames. This is not to say that they
did not apply them in a variety of ways and, at times, with far from ordinary
sensitivity and superior intelligence. Even then, when they agreed to disagree, thespace of innovative Jesuit maneuvering was restrained by the fact that their ultimate
raison d'être was the conversion of the world. Various subsidiary activities of theJesuits, such as the works of mercy (opera caritatis), educational institutions and thelike, were important but were pursued only as means to an end. Hence, some of themwere dropped when considered unnecessary or if they overlapped too closely withsimilar or rival secular institutions. Extremely ambitious in its social involvement, theSociety of Jesus experienced a chronic shortage of personnel and the Jesuits weremore often than not sent as task forces on an ad hoc basis to hospitals, orphanages, orto any other institution or place where their services were needed. This is more or lesswhat happened with the case of the Royal Hospital in Goa. But let us start from the
beginning.
According to canon law, religious and priests were not allowed to practice
medicine without special papal dispensation. The Jesuits did obtain one, Unigeniti Dei
filii, in 1576, with the stipulation that Jesuit doctors were to be employed in the case
103

Jeronimo da Santa Fe, Tratado que fez Hieronimo, medico do papa Benedicto XIII. Contra os
judeus: em que proua o Messias da ley ser vindo, (preceded by the Archbiship, Frey Dom Gaspar deLeão Pereira's letter to the Jews: Carta do primeiro Arcebispo de Goa ao Povo de Israel seguidor
ainda da ley de Moyses, e do Talmud por engano, e malicia dos seu Rabbis), Impresso em Goa porJoão de Endem, por mandado do senhor Arcepispo da India (19/9/1565). Biblioteca Nacional, Lisboa,
Res. 411P, p. 2.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

21of shortage or lack of secular doctors. Even without the papal exemption, the Jesuits
were able to provide medical help by way of a special grade or office among its
members, the so-called "temporal coadjutors". Not ordained priests, these were
employed in low-status and menial jobs like cooking and washing, although some ofthem were painters, surgeons, pharmacists, nurses, etc. One of the most famous
surgeons in Goa, Pedro Afonso, who started his career in 1560 in the Hospital of thePoor Natives, "attached" to the Jesuit College of Saint Paul, was a temporal coadjutor.
Although these were "uneducated" members, that is, without sufficient knowledge of
Latin and theology, and very often recruited from lower social strata, they wereencouraged and allowed to use their skills "for the greater glory of God", just like"spiritual coadjutors" and the "professed" fathers, the highest priestly grades within
the Society.
From the inception, therefore, what Ignatius of Loyola had in mind for his
religious order was to organize it as a "machine", with every member assigned to his
own place according to his talents, qualities and usefulness. In his early work, theSpiritual Exercises, Loyola proposed a spiritual technique, by using prayer andmeditation, for regenerating the human soul deep in the abyss of the self, and thus
enabling the individual to make the right choice with full freedom of mind and underdivine inspiration.104 In the opening pages we read that the purpose of the exercises is"to prepare and predispose our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections andthen, after their removal, to seek and find God's will in the ordering of our life for thesalvation of our soul".105 The first and foremost illness of one's body was located,according to Loyola, in the soul in which disordered affections bound the individual
to sin and demonic illusion. His spiritual diagnosis and therapeutics were in perfectaccord with, and influenced by Galenic humoral theory in which affects or passions
were humors of the soul and any excess of one or the other humor resulted inillness.106
Although a flexible and porous text, because it was not meant to be read but tobe acted, the Spiritual Exercises teach inner discipline, self-abnegation and obedienceto the rules. And these rules come from the higher authority located in a hierarchy offathers, superiors, directors, generals, popes and all the way up to the extraterrestrial
will. But, conversion, as this inner metamorphosis is also called, was not enough forto become a Jesuit. A complementary foundation text for the members of the Societyof Jesus was the Constitutions, which Loyola wrote and re-wrote from the day theSociety was approved by the Pope, in 1540, until his death in 1556. It was not simply
a detailed instrument of governance, or a collection of ordinances comparable to theRules (Regulae) of the older religious orders, but closer to a grammar of the languageof power. The Constitutions is a self-fashioning manual, teaching its readers, who areat the same time its subjects and its objects, how to face authority. Although mirroring
the monarchical and aristocratic model of power distribution, the authority in theConstitutions is a flexible structure geared at practical efficiency and pragmatic104

The right choice, or in Ignatian vocabulary, the election, the discernment of the mind is staged as amultiple dialogue between the divinity, the director of the exercises and the exercitant.
105
Loyola, Ignatius of , Spiritual Exercises, New York, 1948, #1.
106
That the need to evaluate and know psychological make-up of each and every member of theSociety was of utmost importance and it is confirmed in the introduction of the system of triennial
catalogues. Hence, from 1580 each Provincial was to produce every third year a catalogue in three
volumes. Demoustier, Adrien, S.J., "Les catalogues du personnel de la province de Lyon en 1587, 1606
et 1636", Archivum Historicum Societatis Ieus [henceforth, AHSI], 42 and 43, 1973 and 1974; Lamalle,
Edmond, S.J., "Les Catalogues des provinces et des domiciels dela Compagnie de Jésus", AHSI, 13,
1944
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris22

rationalization.107 Never loosing sight of the ultimate plan and purpose of the order the redemption and the salvation of humanity -, Jesuit ministries, as varied as they
were and often considered to be walking precariously on the razor edge of orthodoxy,possessed a clear sense of overall direction. In a word, the rules could also be twisted"for the greater glory of God".
In the overseas missions in India and Asia this multi-layered and flexible
approach to authority was a blessing and, ultimately, proved to be a curse that caused
the Society of Jesus to be dismantled in the eighteenth century. The tropical Catholiccommunities in Goa and in other Portuguese enclaves in the sixteenth century,
especially "profited", in the spiritual and social senses, from the Jesuit impulse touniformity, psychological undergirding and eschatological certitude. When John III,
the King of Portugal, sent Francis Xavier and his companions to the East Indies in1542, he had just that in mind.
Jesuit Corporeal Politics: Martyrdom
The Jesuit conception of the body was not unlike Orta's. The body wasconsidered as potentially adaptable to places and circumstance. This was alluded to in
the portrait of an ideal Jesuit and his qualities in the chapter of the Constitutions inwhich Loyola discussed the modalities of admission to the Society. Pleasing
appearance, health, strength, intellect were all required in Jesuit candidates, although
exceptions could be made, "if it is judged in the Lord that this lack is compensated forby his other qualities."108 When individual members were not completely adaptable, aproper personnel politics could rectify the problem by choosing those who werestrong for services or missions where "greater bodily labors" were indispensable, orby sending a "cultivated person of talent and learning" to work where he wasneeded.109 As a body composed of individual members, the Society of Jesus was themost adapted to face the unknown socio-ecological frontiers opened up by Iberiannaval expansion in the sixteenth century.
Although the Jesuits trusted the Galenic humoral medical theory andtherapeutics, probably even more than did Orta, in their overall soteriological scheme,
corporal health was far under-valued compared to the spiritual health. This did notmean that the body should be allowed to wither away under contemplative practices
or under emaciating austerities associated with old ascetic and conventual orders. On
the contrary, a Jesuit life was precious and had to be conserved as long as possible byphysical exercises, rest, healthy diet and moderation in everything.110"Temperate restraint in spiritual and bodily labor and similar moderation in relation
to the Constitutions, which do not lean toward an extreme of rigor or toward
excessive laxity (and thus they can be better observed) will help this entire body topersevere in its good state and to be maintained in it".111

107

Demoustier, Adrien, S.J.,"La distinction des fonctions et l'exercice du pouvoir selon les règles de laCompagnie de Jésus, in Luce Giard, ed., Les jésuites à la Renaissance; Système éducatif et production
du savoir, Paris, 1995, pp. 3-33 See also Giard, Luce, "Relire les 'Constitutions' ", in Luce Giard andLouis de Vaucelles, Les jésuites à l'âge baroque, 1540-1640, Grenoble, 1996, pp. 23-59.

108

Loyola, Saint Ignatius of, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, translated, with an Introduction and a
Commentary by George E. Ganss, S.J. [henceforth, Constitutions] St. Louis, 1970, Part I, ch. 2, "Thecandidates", para. 151-162.
Constitutions, Part IV, ch. 2, para. 624.
110
Constitutions, Part VI, ch. 3, para. 582.
111
Constitutions, Part X, para. 822.
109

Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

23

Heroic individual feats, especially martyrdom were not whole-heartedly encouraged,
as this was suspected of being reckless and wasteful behavior. In the light of ahagiographic history or an edifying letter re-telling a recent death in the field,
regardless of whether it qualified for red or white martyrdom, Jesuit martyrs werecherished and their deeds amplified to suit European readers and to boost the spirits
and expectations of the young novices and other members. The Jesuit argument wasthat there was nothing intrinsically bad in dying as a witness of faith, in the manner ofan early Christian saint, but that it was even better to exercise "discretion" andprudence and preserve one's body for more strenuous work.112 In fact, each case ofmartyrdom was looked into by the Jesuit authorities in order to discern whether thedeath could have been avoided, or was inevitable and thus divinely inspired. The first
death of a member of the Society in India, Antonio Criminali, who had been struck by
an "infidel" hand, was judged imprudent in spite of a torrent of enthusiastic lettersabout his courage.113
Circuitously, descriptions of scenes of martyrdom and of tortured andfractured bodies serve as one more proof of Jesuit adaptability. Staged as aprovidential, but temporarily tragic battle between forces of good and evil, martyrdom
was the surest inscription of the Christian message on the pagan landscape. The blood
spilled on the ground becomes a fertile compost for the new Christian vine, according
to the Jesuit historical imagination employed to make the best of an otherwise
complicated issue. In the same way, local religious folklore in Salsete, south of Goa,
where the second and more important martyrdom occurred in 1583, accorded a special
place to the spilling of blood. Martyrs, just like any other type of martial heroes, were
easily translated into the tutelary deities of particular lineages and clans. In theseventeenth century, the blood of a Jesuit missionary, João de Brito, would transformthe color of the sand into terra-cotta red. To this day, it is reputed to havethaumaturgic qualities and is taken away as a relic from Oriyur by the pilgrims.
Before the Jesuit martyrs left their blood and bones in the soil, European relics
were steadily imported. We read about them on the ships where they helped to calm
the stormy weather and turbulent seas. They were paraded in processions or, in thelast moment of extreme danger, thrown into the sea. All these and similar rituals
marking, as some would say, the possession of space, appear as favorite topoi in theliterature of maritime disasters, in Jesuit correspondence and in hagiographic histories
and paintings.114 Just as Portuguese "discoverers" planted memorial columns(padrãos) along the coasts of their maritime passage, as an exaggerated token of theirpresence and their claim to proprietorship of the land, Jesuit bodies, alive and dead,were planted with a similar end in mind. Moreover, Jesuit sanctity grew andflourished in the tropics and became part of the social landscape, to the point ofresisting centralizing efforts of the Roman curia, as the scramble for Francis Xavier's
relics clearly revealed. Except for Xavier's right hand, chopped off and sent to Romein 1614, where enshrined in a reliquary it consecrated the side chapel of the Bom

112

See the classification of the Jesuit "athletes" into saints, blessed, venerable, etc. in Tylenda, Joseph,N., Jesuit Saints and Martyrs, Chicago, 1998.
113
See my unpublished article "The Art of Dying in the Tropics: Jesuit Martyrs in India (16th c.)"presented at the conference Religion and Violence, organized by Ronnie Hsia, Hartmut Lehmann, Petervan der Veer, at the University of Amsterdam, 25-28 May, 2000.
114

Brito, Bernardo Gomes de, Historia Tragico Maritima. Em que se escrevem chronologicamente os Naufragios
que tiverão as Naus de Portugal, depois que se poz em exercicio a Navegação da India, Lisboa, 1735-1736, 2 vols.
(anthology of 12 shipwrecks]. See also French translation (in abridged form), Histoires tragico-maritimes; Trois
naufrages portugais au XVIe siècles, Paris, 1999.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

24Gesù church, the Body, as Xavier's relic is locally called, remained encased in the
Bom Jesus in Goa.
In a word, the Jesuits took bodies and their material qualities seriously, but fora different reason than Garcia de Orta. Bodies were so many clay tablets on which thedivine impressed signs of wonder, prophecy and miracle. The duty of humans was toread them carefully.
Providential Signs: The Origin of Disease
Illness, disease and suffering were also divine signs and the result of the sinfulhuman condition. The church fathers had belabored this basic medical fact and theJesuits believed in it as much as Christians, of all denominations. In the missionary
field in Asia, opened up by the Jesuits, disease acquired an additional meaning notunknown in the history of Christianity, that of an ordeal and a divine test. Hindu
religious practices and Islam had already been associated with illness, placed withinclose range of the demonic, the reverse side of the saintly. With a plethora of tropicalparasites against which Europeans had no immunity, and which impressed with theirvirulence and an inevitably deadly results, it was not difficult to attribute disease to amalicious otherworldly agency.
Although the Portuguese studied and learnt quickly the way in which to curethe diseases locally, not all methods were acceptable. In addition, besides these"curing" techniques adopted by Portuguese physicians or adapted to their own
medical practice, there were certain ritual performances widely used in the villagesaround Goa. They consisted in propitiating the goddess Durga, who was considered
responsible for the illness in the first place. Offerings such as flowers and coconuts,
flags and iron, as well as fire sacrifices were involved in this ritual healing geared toannihilate the curse which was believed to be the first cause of the illness.115 Whenthe end of the patient drew near, he was escorted with all the honors (of a corpse) into
the high see and left to float until death.
From other parts of India, Jesuit missionaries reported similar cases in which
the connections between healing and superstition were highlighted. On the Fishery
Coast, in the mission among the Parava pearl-fishing lineage, technically the first
Jesuit mission in India where Xavier spent two years in the mid-1540s, these ritual
methods of healing were branded as downright demonolatry. Manuel de Moraes gavea condensed, caricatured and simplified description of the major ritual instruments
and practices in this southernmost region of the Tamil country. When they, thegentiles, fell sick or were dying or a woman was about to give birth, "they promised tothe devil (dyabro) in the temple (pagode) a certain amount of fanams (fanõis) and thatthey would construct another temple".116 Since paganism was perceived as an
imposture, a reverse image of Christianity, what appears familiar in this accusation,
the fact that Christian religious specialists proceeded in exactly the same manner, wasconsidered precisely the most menacing. This is not so much the case with what
follows, which is a jumbled description of various forms of cultural practices
associated with the temple ceremonies:

115

See also Gracias, Fátima da Silva, Health & Hygiene in Colonial Goa, 1510-1961, New Delhi,
1994, p. 87; Archivo de Pharmacia e Sciencias Accessorias da India Portuguesa, Nova Goa, 1870, p.
19.
116
Manuel de Moraes to the members in Portugal, Cap Comorim, Dec. 15, 1547, ARSI, N.N. 66 I, f.
226v.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

25"It is a custom here to rub oneself with oil and to wash the body, as do the young
black there (?), when they are washed they clean their teeth, then they smear
themselves with sandal [paste or powder], because it smells good; they cook a lotof food and they bring many goats and near the temple they kill them and offer
them to the temple as well as the money they had promised; the Brahmans andsome gentiles do their ceremonies (cyrymonyas), and one man makes himself intoa figure of a demon, saying that he would cure and facilitate the birth; [there is]loud drumming and feasts, much painted cloth; and the one who made himself into
the devil (diabo) […] appears like the real demon."117
There is only a thin line separating impersonating and becoming a devil. Jesuit
missionary reports vacillated between crying devil and pointing to the imposture.
Possession and trance, that is, the descent of the deity into the body of a worshipper,
is one of the most important features of the South Indian religious mentality. It ispresent in a wide spectrum of religious practices, from low-caste worship, exorcism
rites for expelling demons from pregnant women, to Brahmanical worship in major
temples.118 Although most ethnographers and students of religious studies agree thatpossession in India is about personhood, which is a result of multiple renegotiations
between the individual and the collective self, they tend to disagree on just how it
works and what its meaning in particular cases is.119
For Jesuits, possession was either the work of a trickster who intentionally
fooled ignorant people for money, or a downright diabolic intervention. One of theimportant activities, according to missionary letters, was exorcising demons fromnewly converted Christians, neophytes, catechumens and those non-Christians whocame to ask for "medical" help.
Depositions of witnesses who testified at various canonization processesorganized throughout Portuguese Asia shortly after Xavier's death are all narrativesof his thaumaturgical healing powers, from exorcism, curing infertility in women, toresurrection.120 More than two hundred people from Goa, Bassain, Kochi, Kollam,
Melaka, and from the Travancore and the Fishery Coast spilled out their secrets,
hopes and tribulations at an official inquiry. These miraculous stories were written
down in detail by local topazes or línguas (interpreters). From the transfer of thesestories from their oral and bodily presentation onto the palm-leaf manuscripts in
Tamil written by a topaz, to their final translation and abbreviation in Latin in order tobe presented to the Congregation of Sacred Rites in the early seventeenth century, allcultural sap was drained out of them and they were transformed into tombstone
inscriptions. Nevertheless, they eloquently remind us that, although Paravas converted
en masse almost a decade before the arrival of Francis Xavier (1542) for politicalreasons, it was because of his healing methods that they allowed Catholicism to help
them reformulate their social body. Jesuit priests were thus perceived as endowedwith special powers, just as were Muslim fakirs, Hindu yogis and various other117

Manuel de Moraes to the members in Portugal, Cap Comorim, Dec. 15, 1547, , ARSI, N.N. 66 I, f.
226v.
118
See Feeman, Richard, "Dynamics of the Person in the Worship and Sorcery of Malabar",
Purusārtha, 21, 1999.
119
See various articles in Assayag, J. and Tarabout G., eds., La Possession en Asie du Sud; Parole,
Corps, Territoires, Purusārtha, 21, 1999.
120

Monumenta Xaveriana ex autoraphis vel ex antiquioribus exemplis collecta. Scripta varia de Santo Francisco
Xaverio, Matriti, 1912, vol..2.
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26

religious specialists, who all proposed or promised health and prosperity in exchange
for money, prestige, political authority, etc. 121
There is also ample evidence that Jesuit faith-healing techniques andinstruments intrigued and attracted non-Christian healers. The cross, the Bible or thebook of prayers, the holy water and the burning of oil in the church were all taken tohave curative qualities. Some of the native healers ultimately converted toChristianity after having lost confidence in their own powers. Some, on the other
hand, probably converted partly for practical reasons, that is, to be able to keep theirjobs in Goa among the growing Christian population. Thus, Luís Fróis mentioned afamily of Muslim physicians in Goa, two brothers of which converted to Christianity
in 1560, while their father remained Muslim under pretext of not wanting to desert his
Muslim wife.122 It is difficult to speculate what conversion actually meant to theseMuslim physicians. Whatever the case, they probably followed their sense ofpragmatic urgency rather than any fundamentalist or ideological inclination. When, in
spite of all display of Christian medical mystique, the native physicians did not show
any sign of losing their superstitious faith, there were other methods to be used.
Henrique Henriques's complained a few times in his letters about native non-Christianphysicians "who do not cure with remedies in which God deposited the [healing]virtues", but with superstitious prayers to false pagan gods.123 He repeated a similarcomplaint from his mission on the island of Manar between the South Indian coastand Sri Lanka,"And because we know that the physicians who cure make war on us, because
many of them cure with words and other worse things […], we ordered them tojoin us in the house every Saturday in which we tell them how to cure and otherthings they need to know for their souls. After having done this for some weeks weordered them to come every fifteen days."124
If grace was a necessary and indispensable chemical element that changed hearts, theclosely supervised use of time was probably as efficient. Strict time management
produced coherent routine, which then absorbed the sense of direction to otherwise
messy social realities. The famous and often-mentioned methodical approach of
Jesuits to social and natural phenomena is perfectly visible in their missionary field.
Nowhere could one observe better, as in some alchemist laboratory, the formulas ofsocial engineering and cultural transformation than in those clearly bounded mission
121

Although Jesuits did everything to combat and estrange these local healers, they were willing at times to test
their remedies. In 1561, Henrique Henriques, asked for permission to try out local medicine (mezinha) used byjogues, because it was reputed to fortify the body, without mortification, against the "appetite coming fromsensuality". The then General of the Society of Jesus, Laínez, responded a year later from Trent – where heparticipated in the closing sessions of the Church Council -, without offering any decision and leaving the wholematter in hands of the Jesuit Provincial in India. With the election of Francisco de Borja to the office of theGeneral (1565-1572) and with the tightening of the post-Tridentine religious environment, using pagan medicine
became unimaginable. He stiffly ordered the Provincial in Goa, António de Quadros, to leave "the medicine forchastity" to the "bonjes", obviously confounding the name used for the Japanese Buddhist priests with the jogues
from Henriques's letter. What the metropolitan injunction implicitly prohibited was any kind of comensurability
between a Jesuit body and that of a pagan religious specialist. Controlling one's sexual impulses was (and Borja
had in mind just that) the result of choice, will and grace, at least for those who sought membership in the Societyof Jesus.Henrique Henriques, to Diogo Laínez, Mannar, Dec. 19, 1561, ARSI, Goa 8 II, f 294r. Diogo

Laínez, to Henrique Henriques, Trent, 12 Dec., 1562, DI, V, p. 661. Franciso Borja, to António deQuadros, A. de, Rome, 29 Nov., 1565, DI, VI, p. 526
122
Luís Fóis to a brothers in Coimbra, Goa, Dec. 1, 1560, Biblioteca de Ajuda, Lisboa, Ulyssiponensis
2, f.210v
123
Henrique Henriques to the General in Rome, Manakkudi (near Kanniyakumari) , Jan. 13, 1558,
ARSI, Goa 8 I, ff.148v-149r
124
Henrique Henriques to Diogo Laínez (the General), Mannar, Dec. 24-Jan. 11, 1564, ARSI, Goa 8 II,
f.422v.
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27

places in southern India where Jesuits patiently carved and engraved the coordinatesof time and space against what they thought was the ever-encroaching pagan chaos inthe background.
Health as Order and Discipline
Francis Xavier is reputed to have founded some forty or more churches on the
Fishery Coast, from Vembar in the north to Kanniyakumari on the southernmost tip ofthe Indian peninsula.125 These were no more than palm-leaf provisional structures, butthey marked the point of special potentia, the intersection of human and divine, and amiraculous window to an invisible presence of the supernatural. The churches and thegiant crosses in front of them, made out of black varnished wood and lodged into andsupported by white-washed stones, were not simply terrestrial antennas for catching
divine cosmic energy, they were rather power plants of human relations and social
articulation. Although during his first stay among the Paravas, from 1542 to 1544,
Xavier traveled incessantly from one part of the coast to the other, without staying fora longer time in one place, the churches and chapels were left under the supervision of
the prominent Parava catechists. These in were often recruited from or became thechief overseas, pattankkatti, of Christian communities. The head overseers of theParavas, the patangatin-mór in Portuguese or jāti talaivar in Tamil, resided in
Tuticorin [Tūtūkkuti] and the hereditary holder of this office was later to become a
Tamil "little king".126 The new order imposed by Xavier and his successors, such as
Henrique Henriques who arrived to this mission in 1547 and was buried in Tuticorinin 1600, consisted in imposing uniformity in ritual and cult observances, especiallygeared at confession and the sacrament of penance, and in empowering the traditional
caste notables as executive officials subject to the "spiritual" guidance of themissionaries. Through inner and outer regeneration, Jesuit priestly sponsorship thenultimately enhanced the Parava sense of separate identity and caste solidarity.
The success of the mission among the Paravas was not simply a triumph of
Jesuit social engineering, but also the result of a combination of geographical, socialand political factors.127 In different contexts, say in Japan, in the mission at the
Mughal court or in Monomotapa, the contingencies of local politics brought thesituation out of control. In spite of the inevitable setbacks, however, the Jesuits werestill the most influential missionary order, because unlike other zealous missionaries
in the sixteenth century, Franciscans and Dominicans and other ecclesiastical figures,
they not only had the general plan, but also the method. In fact, this method was awork in progress chiseled out and tested through experience. In their gigantic
correspondence from all over the world to Rome and vice versa, made mandatory by
the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits created a forum for exchanging ideas, comparing
notes and taking concerted decisions on a scale that had not been seen before.
According to the Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus, the firstprogram among the Jesuit ministries was: ministries of the Word, of the sacraments
125

Epistolae Mixtae ex variis Europae locis ab anno 1537 ad 1566 scriptae. Matriti, 1898, vol. 1, p.
231. Schurhammer, Georg, S.J., Francis Xavier; His Life, His Times, vol. 2, India, (1541-1545),(Freiburg am Breisgau, 1963) transl. M. J. Costelloe, Rome, 1977 India, p. 341.
126
On the concept of little king in Tamilnadu see Dirks, Nicholas, B., The Hollow Crown; Ethnohistoryof an Indian Kingdom, Ann Arbor, 1993. See also a very informative article by Ā.Sivasuppiramaïiyaú,
Paratar kalveììuc ceytikal (Parava Inscriptions), (xerox copy, no publisher, no date).
127Županov, Ines G., "Prosélytisme et pluralisme religieux: deux expériences missinnaires en Inde aux
XVIe et XVIIe siecles", Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 87, 1994, pp. 35-56..
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

28

and of works of mercy.128 This pastoral triad based on late-medieval catechesis andinstitutions of southern Europe (Spain and Italy) was complemented by the second
program of taking Spiritual Exercises in a secluded place, a "retreat" for a month (orless) under a spiritual guide, and the third program of setting up and managing
humanistic schools. Each and every program, as it was being developed andmaintained, was discussed within the Society in thousands of written pages ofmanuals with detailed instructions. In addition, learned Jesuit theologians were sent to
the provincial residences and colleges to explain these instructions and take note of
local ideas, disagreements and special conditions that had to be taken into account intheir implementation. It was precisely in their bureaucratic skills that the Jesuits
offered the most valuable lessons in administration and management to the secularinstitutions. Even when the Jesuits moved out of the institutions, their rules andregulations remained. And that was the point.
Jesuits were not the only historical actors obsessed with orders, rules andconstitutions. Nor were their normative texts exceptional in their methodology or
executive ingenuity. What was new in their conception of order and discipline wasflexibility of rules that were to be adapted to circumstances; but once accepted, they
had to be obeyed with a religious zeal. Hence, obeying the rules - whatever they may
have been and changeable at that - were elevated to a sacramental pedestal. It was as
if only through rules imposed from above could one sense the working of the sacred,of "God in all things". Thus, every single repetitive, menial and profane act became aprovidential work of grace. The seven corporal works of mercy – feeding the hungry,
giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, visiting the sickand imprisoned and burying the dead – ceased to be what they were, that is, hard
physical labor, and were conceptualized as "contemplation in action" and participationin the divine salutary plan.
The Hospital of the Poor Natives as the "Soul Fishery"
The most famous Jesuit surgeon in Goa in the sixteenth century, Pedro
Afonso, depicted his daily routine in just these terms, that is, as a marvelous exercise
in tedious, humbling and difficult service to the sick.129 He locates his growing senseof importance in a daily "white martyrdom" induced by corporal fatigue and repetitionof innumerable tasks. As if moving down the rosary in prayer, Afonso endlessly
rushes through the Hospital of the Poor Natives established by the Jesuits near theCollege of St. Paul, to the Seminary, then to the House of Catechumens and back. At
each and every step, his work is portrayed as gigantic. During the consultation time
for the outdoor patients, waiting for him every day in front of the door of the Hospital,
he complained that "from time to time, I run out of paper for writing prescriptions". In
addition, given that he was a lay member of the Society, a temporal coadjutor and not

128

The Formula of the Institute is an important document, a product of the discussion among thefounding fathers in Rome in view of presenting their project for papal approval in 1539. "The Five
Chapters", another name of the document, was incorporated in 1540 into Regimini militantis ecclesiae
and is considered as a Rule of the Jesuit order. Constitutions, p. 66. O'Malley, J. W., The First Jesuits,
Cambridge, Mass., 1993, [henceforth, O'Malley], p. 5 and p. 85 The second program were Spiritual
Exercises, practiced in "retreats" and the third program included the schools.
129
Pedro Afonso to the European members, Goa, Dec. 1, 1560, Biblioteca de Ajuda, Lisboa,
Ulyssiponensis 2, ff.329-330v. Also published in Carvalho, Augusto de Silva, Garcia d'Orta, Coimbra,
1934, pp. 184-87. Pedro Afonso inherited the Hospital from Misser Paulo Camerino whom he nursed
until his death in 1560.
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29

a priest, the burden of managing financial transactions, such as the collection of alms
for the hospital, was also his responsibility.
Significantly, Afonso went beyond a simple enumeration of his daily laborsand pious exhortations. His is, in fact, the clearest statement of what a Jesuit medical
mission in India was, or should have been,. The Hospital of the Poor Natives was, in
his words, "a fishery of souls" (pescaria das almas)".
"The procedure and the manner, my dear brothers, by which the Lord brings
the souls is the following: first, the native gentiles, when they are struck byillnesses that they cannot cure and have no more confidence in their gods andsorcerers, they come to take refuge among the flock of the Church because of
their ailments and out of necessity ".
Among the infirmities he mentioned in his letter, the most prominent were
wounds, either inflicted by arms or in attacks by animals or in accidents. Just like
Garcia de Orta or Cristóvão da Costa, another New Christian doctor, Afonso agrees
that there are also new illnesses, unknown to the "ancient (medical) writers"(escritores antigos). To cure these new types of illnesses he placed his trust firmly inprayer to God, and in particular to the "Cosmos Santos" (Cosma and Damian,physicians and Christian martyrs) to teach him and to provide the remedy. Given that
his final goal was not necessarily to restore the body to health, but to heal the soul, he
worked harder on converting his patients to Christianity than anything else. All curesin the Hospital began with baptism, especially for those who were in articulo mortis.
For Christians treatment began with confession.130 The ailing body for this Jesuit
surgeon, especially the body broken and torn open, was nothing more nor less than an
inscription of disorder caused by gentility and sins. The ultimate cure was, of course,
conversion.
From the beginning of the Hospital, founded by Misser Paulo Camerino in 1546, it
was clear that it was intended to draw non-Christians into the net of conversion.131
Behind this propagandist façade, the assistance that the Jesuits provided to the mostindigent in Goa was, nevertheless, real and heroic. Some years later, in 1552, Reymão
Pereira painted an idyllic image of the order reigning in the Hospital.132 The beds,
mats, and covers could not be cleaner; the reserves of food were copious; the waterfrom the garden well was healthy; the chickens in the yard were destined to feed thesick; female and male patients were separated and located in two different "houses".
Some thirty to forty patients were admitted into this little medical utopia. The good
example and reputation of this institution, Pereira noted, was such that pious
Portuguese chose to die in the Hospital consoled by father Misser Paulo. The
governors came in person to visit the place and were "amply consoled to see therespect of good order inside".
It is quite obvious that the Hospital of the Poor Natives in Goa was intended tobe more than a common hospital. It was an edifying example of the Jesuit ability tofruitfully and orderly combine the works of mercy with the ministry of the Word. In asimilar way, other hospitals on the Fishery Coast and in Japan would in their turn becharacterized as marvelous because of the order established in them. The importance130

It was Ignatius of Loyola who made a campaign in 1543 to reinvigorate an old decree of the Lateran Council of1215, "Cum infirmitas" stressing the healing quality of the sacrament of penitence. Except Rome and some other
Italian towns, it seems that it was never universally applied. Tachhi Venturi, Pietro, Storia della Compagnia diGesù in Italia, Roma, 1951, vol. 2, part 2, p. 190-195.
131
Determinação e asemto pera a ordem da casa (by. Nicolao Lancilotto), Goa, June 27, 1546, ARSI, Goa 22 I,
ff. 48v-49r.
132Reymão Pereira to Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, Goa, Dec., 8, 1552, Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisboa, Ulyssiponensis
1, 162r-163r.
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30

given to order indicates that it was perceived as lacking in other charitable institutions
and in the Estado da Índia in general. At least three other hospitals were mentioned in
the contemporary sources, without much enthusiasm for their effectiveness: the Royal
Hospital ( Hospital del-Rey), the Hospital of the Incurables (Hospital de Todos os
Santos established by the Santa Casa da Misericordia de Goa), and the Hospital forcontagious diseases (São Lazaro). Although information is scarce about thefunctioning of the last two in the sixteenth century, they did not serve to cure thediseased, but to nurse them until death and, more importantly, to remove them frompublic sight, lest they contaminate the healthy.
The Royal Hospital probably had the strongest record of curing patients and it
was, in fact, intended to do so. Nevertheless, its statistics of success appear to havebeen less than brilliant and confirmed the adage that one had equal chances to be
cured by a doctor, or to be killed by him. In its own right, the Royal Hospital, foundedby Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510, was an important institution in Portuguese Goa
because it was an exemplary charitable work, a showcase of the royal and official careprovided to Portuguese soldiers. In principle, at least, no mestiço or foreign men were
eligible for admission to the hospital.133 In terms of prestige and reputation, therefore,
the Royal Hospital was to the Viceroyal government what the Hospital of the Poor
Natives was to the Jesuits. Reymão Pereira's statement that the governors came tovisit the hospital "to be consoled" appears in this new light as a pragmatic act, rather
than a spiritual or pious visit.134
What impressed the Governor was what everybody knew Jesuits were good at:organizing time and space efficiently.135 Although there appear to have been no
separate rules for the Hospital of the Poor Natives, since it was considered to belong
to the complex of institutions around the Jesuit College of St. Paul, "the general rulesof the [Jesuit] house [college]", written in 1552 by Gaspar Barzaeus, are quite
enlightening on this point. He "took into account the spiritual advice of Father MasterSymão [Rodrigues]" and adapted them [the rules] "to the dispositions of thecountry."136 He objectified and prescribed the smallest gestures - from those of abrother in charge of washing clothes (roupeiro), or one in charge of awakening
everybody in the morning (despertador) – in order to link the sacred and the profanewith an invisible bond. In other words, the most humble tasks were associated with a
Christic imagery, and all physical labor was presented as the labor of Christ. Washingclothes became washing clothes in place of Christ, etc.
On the other hand, the repetition implied in these rules was reassuring. A Jesuit
nurse (infermeyro), for example, had a variety of responsibilities and a precise timeschedule. In the morning, before anything else, he had to verify the health of thebrothers and inform the doctor. If there were sick persons, his duty was to provide
comfort to the patient by ensuring that he was served the special food ordered by thephysician, that his room was clean and by simply being patient with him,"in speech and in your example, because this is the principal virtue that you
should employ in your office by always imitating Christ among his disciples.
133

While exceptions were made, women were never admitted. Hospitalizing women was a problem even for theJesuit Hospital of the Poor Natives and the practice of housing them in the same building was quickly

discontinued.
O'Malley, p. 249. On the whole the Jesuits did in fact possess a sufficient knowledge of the hospitaladministration , of the latest methods of hygiene and nursing, both because of the compulsory novitiate"experiment" and because, in this manner, the new recruits had been invited to repeat the gestures ofthe founding fathers in the hospitals of Venice.

134

135
136

The Spiritual Exercises to the Constitutions are master examples of regulatory texts.
Gaspar Barzaeus to Ignatius of Loyola, Goa, Jan. 12, 1553, ARSI, Goa 10 I, f. 567v.
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31

Be careful that their foul smells and their infirmities do not disgust you andmake you sick because it is your sins that make you sensible to these smells;
Christ was not revolted when he ascended the Mount of Calvary where he
washed away your sins.137
In addition, he was responsible for reporting to the physician how much the patient ate
and how he felt. He was responsible for keeping clean clothes for the patients in a
special chest. And finally, once a week he had to read the rules prescribed for his
office.
These rules were, in fact, job descriptions, and in Europe and Rome they were
to be found under the title of "Common Rules" important in organizing "the domestic
discipline" of the professed house.138 The number of such rules grew almost out ofhand as each Jesuit institution, large or small, petitioned to have rules of their own.
Jeronimo Nadal, the indefatigable interpreter of the Constitutions, traveled extensively
in the mid-1550s in order to shore up enthusiasm for their implementation and to
explain and clarify the finer points. However, after visiting Córdoba in 1554, a Jesuit
reported that Nadal had left more than three hundred rules and regulations. Eighty of
those were destined for the rector, who did not have the time to read them.139
Jesuit Emergency Sanitary Measures: Epidemics in Goa
In Goa, Jesuit know-how in rationalizing the administration of things,
institutions and humans meant that they were in great demand by the secularauthorities. When, in 1570, one of the bairros of Goa was struck by an epidemic
disease and more than nine hundred people were infected, it was the Jesuits whobrought the situation under control. The center-piece of the report written by a Jesuit,
Duarte Leitão, was a detailed presentation of the emergency procedure organized by
the Society.140 Significantly, it all began with taking a census of the sick in theaffected suburbs (rol dos doentes que avia em cada bairo).141 Then, they consulted thegentile doctors who were mostly in charge of these people, before turning to thefisico-mór, Dimas Bosque, "a great friend of the [Jesuit] house" (grande amigo dacasa), who, incidentally, had aslo been a good friend of Garcia de Orta. Finally, theyrecalled Pedro Afonso, who had moved to the Salsete region in the south of Goa
following the transfer of the Hospital of the Poor Natives. The efficient andsystematic organization of Leitão's report appears to correspond to the public
performance of the Jesuits in a health emergency.
First he discussed the causes and proposed various explanations based on the
humoral conception of the disease.
"Different causes are proposed for this disease. The majority said that it wasdue to corrupted air because an elephant died there and they left it rot without
removing it, and the foul smells corrupted the air and provoked this pestilential
disease (doença como peste). In the beginning, it started with fever and then137

Regras de casa jerais da ordem do bom Jesu noso Salvador, written by Gaspar Barzaeus (rules forthe college of St. Paul in Goa), Sept or Oct. 1552, ARSI, Goa 10 II, ff. 489v490r.
138
Manuel Ruiz Jurado, Orígines del noviciado en la Compañía de Jesús, Rome, 1980, pp. 6 4-65.
139
O'Malley, p. 338.
140

Duarte Leitão to the members of the Portuguese province, Goa, Nov. 16. 1570, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon,
Fundo Geral, 4532, ff, 80r-83r.
141
Duarte Leitão to the members of the Portuguese province, Goa, Nov. 16. 1570, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon,
Fundo Geral, 4532, ff, 81v-82r.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris32

swellings appeared and the sick became yellow and dropsical, and in the end
diarrhea killed them in a few days."142
At the end of the epidemic and the Jesuit efforts to curb it, and at the end of Leitão's
narrative, a surge of surreal and divine concluded the story. As if borrowing anothervoice, the Jesuit correspondent reassured his audience that the forces from the otherworld watched carefully over the actions of the puny terrestrial actors and thateveryone recognized the touch of sanctification in this whole affair. The people (povo)
were astonished not only "at our familiarity with the sick given that the disease wascontagious", but also at the fact that none of the Jesuits had fallen sick. "It appearedthat this exercise of our Lord redoubled our forces".143
With hindsight, a century and half later, Francisco de Souza, a famous earlyseventeenth-century historian, situated the epidemic in the larger context of theecological and social decadence of the capital city of the Estado da Índia.144 It was
one of many contagious epidemics with high mortality that followed in the wake ofwars, sieges and famines which regularly punctuated the late sixteenth and the whole
seventeenth centuries. Worst of all, according to this confident and assertive Jesuit
apologist, the 1570 epidemic was a straightforward symptom of social malaise and of
vitiated ties of solidarity. By combining different reports, Leitão's included, Souza
condemned the social customs in Goa as aberrant, barbaric, and against "natural law"and "against the Bible". The owners abandoned their sick slaves on the streets and,thus, into the hands of the Jesuits who nursed them, enfranchised them, baptized themand buried them. Another proof that social relations were going from bad to worse
was, according to Souza, the disappearance of the Tribunal da Mesa da Consciencia,
established in 1570 by the archbishop and by two Jesuit fathers, António de Quadros
and Belchior Nunes Barreto: "since it was about conscience, it could not have lasted
in India where conscience is more easily broken than stomachs".145
Monastery or Prison: The Royal Hospital in Goa
The Royal Hospital in Goa was one of the fields of Jesuit apostolic action.
They kept temporal and spiritual hygiene in this important Portuguese institution,
marred otherwise by incompetent management and corruption.146 It has been said thatthe funds provided from the royal revenues in Asia were siphoned away, from thehighest official in charge, the mordomo, to the washerman. Thus, from 1578, theJesuits intensified their "help" because of the growing number of diseased and, whensome three hundred died in the Royal Hospital due to lack of care, the Viceroy
ordered the Society of Jesus to take full charge of it.147 It is quite certain that this put
additional strain on the members, and some like Giovanni Battista de Loffreda, atalented physician, but short-tempered and conceited, expressed loudly their

142
Duarte Leitão to the members of the Portuguese province, Goa, Nov. 16. 1570, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon,
Fundo Geral, 4532, f.82v.
143
Duarte Leitão to the members of the Portuguese province, Goa, Nov. 16. 1570, Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon,
Fundo Geral, 4532, ff. 82v-83r.
144
Souza, Francisco de, Oriente Conquistado a Jesus Christo pelos Padres da Companhia de Jesus da Província
de Goa (1710), [henceforth, Souza] Porto, 1978, I, I, 39.
145
Souza, I, I, 39 .

146
147

Cristóvão de Castro to Claudio Aquaviva, Cochin, Jan. 5, 1582, ARSI, Goa 13 I, ff. 104r-105v.

Gomes Vaz to Mercurian, Goa, Oct. 20, 1578, ARSI, Goa 31, 404v-405r. The Governor Dom Diogo de
Menezes ordered each religious order to serve in the Royal Hospital for a month.
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33

discontent.148 Nevertheless, the Provincial, Ruy Vicente, accepted the charge
temporarily ("ad tempus") because the general policy of the Jesuits was to obey
secular heads, especially the Viceroy of the Estado da Índia, the highest Portuguese
authority in Asia.149
However, what looked like a temporary service lasted intermittently for a
century and half. It was the Royal Hospital, not the Hospital of the Poor Natives, that
became the most famous Jesuit "medical mission" in India.150 "It is such a greatwork", wrote Cristóvão de Castro to Claudio Aquaviva in 1582, "and such a great
service to Our Lord and on it depends the spiritual and temporal good of all India,
because the lives of men depend on it, that is, of almost all soldiers."151 Soldiers' lives
depended, in fact, on the military discipline enforced by the Jesuits. Their pre-modern
technology of health, a combination of prescribed diet, unreliable medication andreligious healing with sacraments, relics and holy objects, made sense and produced
the psychological undergirding only when applied with absolute assurance. Besides,
the subjective effects of discipline, the maintenance of rigorous hygiene and financial
responsibility objectively improved health care in the Royal Hospital. When, in 1583,
the Jesuits finally hoped to pass back the administration to the Misericórdia, which
had been in charge until 1579, they wrote a comprehensive new Regimento for the
Hospital. The internal organization of the hospital, according to these rules, was to be
structured along the lines of efficiency, security and trust, that is, the Hospital wasconceptualized as an independent fortress of medical mystique, an extraterritorial
space with sui generis jurisdiction. Or, at least, that was the point the Jesuits weremaking. Thus, the art of curing became the art of managing the patients. Two basic
principles underscored the social conditions of healing, according to the Regimento:
1) the smooth repetitiveness of medical or paramedical gestures inscribed in time(every morning, every day, every week, every year), and 2) a strict division of tasks
and offices among the hospital personnel.
In the opening of the first chapter, the order in the Royal Hospital isunambiguously linked to the health and life of the Portuguese in Goa.
"Because the life, and health of the sick depends much on a good cure, and on its
order: the order that should be kept in the Hospital every day is the following".152
What follows is a busy time-table of work for just about everybody, patients included.
The day began at five o'clock in the morning with church bells and the first Mass,
where all protagonists of the daily drama met: the superintendent (mordomo), thenurse (enfermeiro), the priest or a chaplain (Padre ou capellão) the registrar(escrivão), the physician (médico), the surgeon (cirurgião), the pharmacist(boticairo), the overseer (vedor), the doorman (porteiro), the barber (barbeiro), thepurchaser (comprador), the baker (padeiro), the washerman (mainato) the servants(servidores), and other occasional helpers. Each and every step of these actors is thenfollowed almost hour by hour, as they visited the sick, prescribed and prepared
medicine, ordered special food, supervised the cleaning of the hospital, attended to148

See my article Curing the Body, Healing the Soul; Jesuit Medical Mission in 16th Century India presented in
Florence at the workshop Jesuit Intermediaries in the Early Modern World, (11-13 Oct. 2001). Francesco Pasio to
the General, Goa. Oct. 27, 1580, ARSI, Goa 47, f. 133v-134r.
149
Ruy Vicente to the General, Goa, Nov. 13, 1579, ARSI, Goa 12 II, f.497v.
150

With every new Portuguese Governor or Viceroy, the Jesuits tried to relinquish their charge of theRoyal Hospital. It was considered by all, especially by the General Claudio Aquaviva, that temporaladministration of the Royal Hospital was against the Jesuit Constitutions. See Ruy Vincente to Claudio
Aquaviva [Annua], Goa, Nov. 8, 1581, ARSI, Goa 32, f. 445r.
151
Cristóvão de Castro to Claudio Aquaviva, Cochin, Jan. 5, 1582, ARSI, Goa 13 I, ff. 104r-105v.
152
APO, Fasc. V/III, p.1006.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

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newly arrived patients who waited on the veranda to be examined and confessed, andso on. The busy rhythm of the Hospital activities was punctured by two meals, lunch
at nine in the morning and dinner at five in the evening, and the cleaning of thechamber pots at eleven and three in the morning. Three times a week all the beds were
to be thoroughly washed and fragrant substances burnt in all rooms in order to chaseaway foul smells.
Besides these instructions concerning the daily schedule, the Jesuits also
provided a calendar of yearly expenses. Depending on the arrival of merchant ships
either from Portugal or from the East and South East Asia, officials were to buy foodstuffs and medicine to be used later. The reason for the planning of Hospitalprovisions in advance was that those things were "better and cheaper" when bought at
the right time. In September and October, Portuguese wine, olives and vinegar werebought from India-bound ships; in March and April, rice, sugar and wax were boughtfrom Bengal; in April and May, valuable spices like cinnamon and cloves, andmedicinal substances such as páo da China and benjoim were imported from Melaka
and China, etc. In June and July, the Royal Hospital had to be refurbished andprovisioned with all the necessary equipment (new beds, linen, etc.) in preparation of
the arrival of the ships from Portugal with, as a rule, a huge number of sick soldiers.
And finally, three times a year all the "houses of the Hospital had to be whitewashed"
for the holy festivities of Our Lady in August, for Christmas and for Easter. The
chapel in the Hospital was whitewashed once a year for the feast of the Holy Spirit, its"patron saint (orago)".
The second chapter of the Regimento gives detailed instructions to individual
officials, arranged in decreasing order of responsibility and authority in the Hospital.
At the head was the Mordomo, who should always be selected from among the"brothers" of the Misericórdia who were "honorable, noble, rich, prudent, liberal,compassionate, of good life and reputation", etc. He was, in fact, elected "in place of
the Purveyor (Provedor) of the Santa Misericórdia", the highest office concerned withpublic assistance in the Estado da Índia, and was to be obeyed by all others in the
Hospital. The mordomo's job description is scrupulously detailed with an additional
time-schedule and yearly calendar just for his special tasks. The trickling down ofauthority and responsibility is one of the major Jesuit preoccupations. Who obeys orcommands whom is prescribed as clearly as possible, thus fostering individual
responsibility. Except for those at the bottom of the list, who consisted of both freelabor and of slaves, and were there only "to be always ready to do what was ordered".
Other than the mordomo and the priest, all other employees received wages,"calculated" from the highest twenty-five xerafins per month for the physician to two
and half xerafins plus food and half a liter of urraqua, that is, locally produced
alcohol, for menial laborers. Therefore, each person was assigned his place and his
worth on this list, just as on the "list of medication (pauta das mezinhas)" each
medicine had its price.
Both the Regimento and pauta das mezinhas were revised and changed in theyears to come, but the basic structure remained the same. In spite of these pedantic
rules, the administration by the Misericórdia did not seem to work and the Governor,
Matias de Albuquerque (1591-97), ordered the Jesuits to take over the Royal Hospitalagain.153 The problem was obviously larger than the body of rules governing the
behavior of the Hospital officials. Lack of funds and regular financial support, thedeteriorating ecological condition of the town of Goa and the vicissitudes of local
153

APO, Fasc. III, p. 333.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

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politics made the Hospital unmanageable. With a new building constructed in 1609,
things were improving and the French traveler, Pyrard de Laval, extolled it as the bestin the world. Besides the beautiful building, the object of his admiration was the"good order and supervision (bel ordre et police)" and the cleanliness reigning inside.
Finally, the Hospital was like a "monastery", with the resident Jesuit father incommand of all other officials. But it was also like a prison, since nobody could leave
the hospital, receive letters or visits without permission. Pyrard de Laval, who wasadmitted to the Hospital as the prisoner of a Portuguese captain, went straight to theprison of the Vedor da Fazenda upon regaining his health. Finally, of all the places
Laval visited in Goa, the Royal Hospital remained the only place associated withhealth, with order and good customs (charity, compassion, liberality, sexual
continence). All other institutions, from prisons to the intimate world of thePortuguese families, were perceived as unruly and sick.
Epilogue
By the seventeenth century, therefore, just about everything possible was done
to make Goa a healthier place. Garcia de Orta left his monumental work, which wasboth a description and prescription for healthy life and rapid cure. His Galenic
humoral optimism, enriched by the knowledge he collected through exchanges with
Hindu and Muslim medical practitioners and his view of the human body as basically
adaptable to all climates, was and continued to be shared by physicians. Jesuit
engagement in medical care and social welfare in the second part of the sixteenth
century was in no way opposed to Orta's ideas. Jesuit intention was to de-secularize
medical practice through the introduction of religious medicine or "medicine of thesoul", such as sacraments and holy objects. At the same time, the introduction of theInquisition and the anti-New Christian panic, wafting from Lisbon and reaching its
paroxysm in Goa, worked together to delegitimize the medical elite available in thecapital of the Estado da Índia. Fear of Judaizers nourished fear of pagans, especiallyof the Brahmans, who were likened to the Jews. This led to another exodus, forced by
the Portuguese authorities, of qualified physicians from Portuguese territory. With
ecological disaster in store as the population grew, the Mandovi River silted up,
rotting garbage piled high and infiltrated drinking water, combined with politicaldifficulties and periodic sieges and attacks in the hinterland, the Jesuit medical
mission in the Royal Hospital of Goa was a "civilizing mission", a mission aimed atrewiring social bonds and engendering a sense of responsible solidarity towards "sickneighbors" and the environment. The Jesuit opera caritatis were certainly inspired intheir roots by late-medieval piety, but the way they went about putting them into
practice was closer to the technologies of the flesh and mind of the modern period.
Not yet, Foucault's panopticum, the Royal Hospital in Goa was a very special place, autopian place to exercise such new mental tools as professional responsibility andaccountability, method, time-schedule, advanced planning, as well as authentic active
compassion.
For Orta, passion and desire and a conscious adaptation of the body to theecological environment were constitutive of a healthy individual, while healing took
place in the private space of the home (of the patient or of the physician). The
remedies used were a combination of natural substances and selected customary
practices, on the basis of local and European medical experience. The relationshipbetween the physician and the patient was based on trust, and for that very reason was
fragile and fraught with tensions. On the other hand, in Jesuit opinion, the compassion
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris

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and the desire to obey were constitutive of a healthy society The patient did not haveto trust the individual physician. He had to trust the system that prescribed the law andenforced it.154

154

See article by Victoria Khan, " 'The Duty to Love': Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political
Theory", Representations, No. 68, Fall 1999.
Ines G. Županov, CNRS, Paris