Pablo F. Gómez

My work focuses on histories of health, the human body, material practices, and knowledge-making about the natural world in the early modern world, with a particular focus on the histories of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. My new book, Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (Spring 2026). The book examines how, through their material practices, Iberian Atlantic slave trading communities made human corporeality articulable with a new set of ideas about finance, facts, objectivity, and measurable risk that emerged in the early modern era. In doing so, they created and diffused over a large geography a model for understanding human bodies that foreshadows and shares basic notions with those sustaining the intellectual edifice of disciplines as varied as political arithmetic, economics, population health, demographics, epidemiology, and contemporary biomedicine. My first book, The Experiential Caribbean, won the 2019 Welch Medal and the 2018 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize. I also coedited The Gray Zones of Medicine, a volume that explores the history of health practices in Latin America from the 16th to the 21st century through the biographies of unlicensed healers. I am now working on two projects. One that explores the imagination of new histories of disease, value, bodies, labor, and subjectivity in the Caribbean. The second studies the possibilities of a history of materiality for framing new types of medical histories in Latin American, Iberian Atlantic and Mediterranean spaces.

Education

Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, History of Medicine, Latin American History, 2010
M.A., Vanderbilt University, History, 2007
Orthopaedic Surgeon, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Surgery, 2002
M.D., CES University, Medellín, Colombia, Medicine, 1994

Books

Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality

Pablo F. Gómez. Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality. University of Chicago Press, 2026.

Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, officials, notaries, and ship captains began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the Spanish, Portuguese, and African slave trades used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their probabilities with the brutal aim of protecting their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks. A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, Gómez shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.

The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America

Pablo F. Gómez (Editor), and Diego Armus (Editor). The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.

Health practitioners working in gray zones, or between official and unofficial medicines, played a fundamental role in shaping Latin America from the colonial period onward. The Gray Zones of Medicine offers a human, relatable, complex examination of the history of health and healing in Latin America across five centuries. Contributors uncover how biographical narratives of individual actors—outside those of hegemonic biomedical knowledge, careers of successful doctors, public health initiatives, and research and medical institutions—can provide a unique window into larger social, cultural, political, and economic historical changes and continuities in the region. They reveal the power of such stories to illuminate intricacies and resilient features of the history of health and disease, and they demonstrate the importance of escaping analytical constraints posed by binary frameworks of legality/illegality, learned/popular, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy when writing about the past. Through an accessible and story-like format, this book unlocks the potential of historical narratives of healings to understand and give nuance to processes too frequently articulated through intellectual medical histories or the lenses of empires, nation-states, and their institutions.

The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

Pablo F. Gómez. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Opening a window on a dynamic realm far beyond imperial courts, anatomical theaters, and learned societies, Pablo F. Gómez examines the strategies that Caribbean people used to create authoritative, experientially based knowledge about the human body and the natural world during the long seventeenth century. Gómez treats the early modern intellectual culture of these mostly black and free Caribbean communities on its own merits and not only as it relates to well-known frameworks for the study of science and medicine. Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gómez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.

Selected Publications

• “Hechos, Tachas, y Plata: Value, Facts and Bodies in Early Latin America,” Tapuya, Latin American Science, Technology and Society. Vol, 7. 2024.
• Pablo F. Gómez, “[Un] Muffled Histories: Translating Bodily Practices in the Early Modern Caribbean.” Osiris 37, no. 1 (2022): 233-250.
• “Domingo de la Ascensión and the Criollo Healing Culture of the Seventeenth Century Caribbean,” in The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America, Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez, Eds. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021).
• “Pieza de Indias: Slave Trade and the Quantification of Human Bodies,” in Objects of New World Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities, Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, Eds. (University of London Press, 2021).
• “Hospitals and Public Health in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean,” in The Spanish Caribbean in the Sixteenth Century, Ida Altman and David Wheat, Eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
• “Caribbean Stones and the Creation of Early Modern Worlds,” History and Technology 34 (2018).
• “Afro-Caribbean Healers,” in ed. William Beezley, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Jane Landers, Pablo Gómez, José Polo Acuña and Courtney J. Campbell, “Researching the history of slavery in Colombia and Brazil through ecclesiastical and notarial archives,” in ed. Maja Kominko, From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme, (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 259-92.
• “Incommensurable Epistemologies? The Atlantic Geography of Healing in the Early Modern Black Spanish Caribbean,” in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (2014) 44: 95-107. Duke University Press.
• “Transatlantic Meanings: African Rituals and Material Culture from the Early-Modern Spanish Caribbean,” in Materialities of Rituals in the Black Atlantic, eds. Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
• “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century Black Spanish Caribbean,” in Social History of Medicine, (2013) 26 (3): 383-402. * Winner of the  2014 Biannual Best Article Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians, and the Vanderwood Prize-Honorable mention for Best Article, The Conference in Latin American History (CLAH), 2014-2015.

Advisor To

• Suzanne Rubinstein
• Jorge Trinidad Espinoza
• Mariana Sarkis Olson
• Emma Tomlins

History Courses Taught

• History 347 – The Caribbean and its Diasporas
• History 423 – History of the Caribbean
• History 999 – Grad Seminar “The Many Histories of Early Latin America”
• Hist of Science 720
• Med Hist 231 – Introduction to Social Medicine
• Med Hist 275 – Science, Medicine and Race: A History.
• Med Hist 507 – Health and Healing I: History of Healing from Antiquity to 1750.
• Med Hist 564 – Disease, Medicine and Public Health in the History of Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Med Hist 919 – Health, Healing and Science in Africa and the African Diaspora.
• Med Hist 919 – Grad seminar on “History of medicine and science in Latin America”
• Med Hist 919 – Flesh and Metal: A History of Bodies, Race, Labor, and Capital