Between February of 1797 and July of 1798, Francisco Barrera y Domingo, a Spanish surgeon, wrote an extensive treatise on slave medicine in the Caribbean. Entitled Reflexiones Historico Fisico Naturales Medico Quirurgicas, this 894-page manuscript accounts for eighteen years of its author's professional practice in the region. It provides a clear picture of daily life in the sugar plantations as seen through the eyes of a modest surgeon, thus presenting us with an opportunity to explore the ideological and intellectual universe of this “invisible” category of colonial practitioners. Despite its importance, Barrera's Reflexiones remains almost unknown. Only a handful of scholars have even acknowledged the existence of the volume and no systematic analysis of its content is available in English.

Este ensayo es una reconstrucción del proceso de apropiación discursiva que el cirujano español Francisco Barrera y Domingo utilizó para producir su estudio sobre la nostalgia de los esclavos en la Cuba del siglo dieciocho.

This article focuses on three overlapping trends in the historical study of human responses to illness, labeled as “new history of medicine, history of public health, and sociocultural history of disease.” The topics range from colonial epidemiology and pharmacopoeia to twentieth-century public health institutions and urban hygiene. But a consistent focus on the social, cultural, and symbolic components of diseases and cures unifies this historiography and distinguishes it from the narrower scope of the long-established field of the history of medicine.