Reviewed by:

• Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal's Empire, 1450–1700 by Hugh Cagle
• Suman Seth

In 1787, the English physician, Benjamin Moseley, who had practiced and served as surgeon-general in Jamaica, published A Treatise on Tropical Diseases and on the Climate of the West Indies. The book was perhaps the first English-language work to include the term "tropical diseases" in its title and scholars have, in general, identified the end of the eighteenth century as the period in which the idea of the tropics as a distinct disease environment began to emerge. In this monograph, the author argues that the scholarship is mistaken on this point—that such a conception emerged roughly a century earlier—and that the reason for the error is that we have been looking in the wrong place. Had more of the literature focused on the Portuguese empire than those, say, of the British or French, it would have seen, already in the seventeenth century, arguments for the similarity of diseases between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and their differences from the afflictions of more temperate zones.

To this bold intervention into the history of medicine, the author adds an important corrective to the history of science. The period covered by Assembling the Tropics is one often described in terms of "the" (or at least "a") "Scientific Revolution." In analyzing the works of those studying the natural world at this time, scholars have often tried to identify the novel epistemologies and ontologies that supposedly characterized a newly empiricist age. As Cagle elegantly demonstrates, however, empiricism came in many forms and was encouraged by many logics. For example, that of Garcia de Orta, physician and author of Coloquios dos simples, e drogas e cousas medicinais da India (published in Goa in 1563) was shaped by his involvement in trade in eastern India. Thus, his "work of accumulating, comparing, and identifying Asian nature spoke first and foremost to the intertwined commercial and epidemiological concerns of disadvantaged traders" (p. 309). Instead of trying to read the Coloquios alongside the classics of the European scientific revolution, then, we are directed to see Orta's text as part of "the bustle, possibility and uncertainty of life in mid-sixteenth century Goa—a world rich with commercial and curative possibility, but also riven with economic and epidemiological uncertainty" (p. 65).

The book is divided into three unequal sections, defined geographically and in rough chronological order. The first, made up of a single chapter, looks at Portuguese exploration on the coast of [End Page 164] western Africa from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. In this period, Portuguese travelers and traders grappled with the seeming refutation of once-authoritative classical knowledge. Aristotle and others had posited the existence of a lifeless, parched and arid region—the torrid zone—between the tropics. Instead, the Portuguese found a rich and verdant land, one whose very fecundity set up a medical conundrum. Where life seemed so abundant, why did death, particularly from debilitating fevers, seem equally plentiful? The same apparent paradox was to be found in Goa, the principle location of the second section. The main protagonist in the three chapters of this chapters is Orta, with Cagle seeking to steer a third route between two, largely antagonistic, ways of understanding his contributions. Where some scholars have tried to fit Orta into the mould of a "Renaissance humanist" or else a "Portuguese progenitor of a scientific revolution" (p. 64) and others have portrayed him as an intermediary between European and Indian worlds, with his Coloquios serving as a means of transmitting Indian medical knowledge, Cagle insists on understanding de Orta on his own terms and in his own place. Certainly one comes to see the Coloquios as an amalgam, with a fraught religious and social politics shaping engagements with Hindu and Muslim medicine and the curative practices of women from multiple backgrounds. Yet, at the same time, Cagle's aim is almost intimate: "to encounter Goa as Orta did, to peer over...

审核人：

• 集合热带地区：葡萄牙帝国的科学和医学，1450-1700年，休·卡格（Hugh Cagle）
• 苏曼·塞斯（Suman Seth）

1787年，曾在牙买加执业并担任外科医生的英国医生本杰明·莫斯利（Benjamin Moseley）发表了《热带病和西印度群岛气候专论》。。该书也许是第一本在其标题中包含“热带疾病”一词的英语著作，并且学者们普遍认为，十八世纪末是热带地区作为独特疾病环境的时期。开始出现。在这本专论中，作者认为，就这一点而言，奖学金是错误的-这种概念大约在一个世纪之前就出现了-错误的原因是我们一直在错误的地方寻找。如果有更多的文献关注的是葡萄牙帝国而不是英国或法国，那么早在17世纪，就已经看到了关于北回归线和摩ri座之间疾病相似性以及它们与人类之间差异的争论。更温带地区的痛苦。

除了对医学史的这种大胆干预之外，作者还对科学史进行了重要的修正。集合热带地区所涵盖的时期通常用“（或至少）一个”“科学革命”来描述。在分析当时研究自然世界的人们的作品时，学者们经常试图找出据认为是新经验主义时代特征的新颖认识论和本体论。然而，正如卡格勒（Cagle）优雅地展示的那样，经验主义以多种形式出现，并受到许多逻辑的鼓舞。例如，印度的Coloquios dos simples，drogas e cousas medicinais da的医生兼作者Garcia de Orta的著作（于1563年在果阿出版）的形成源于他参与印度东部的贸易。因此，他的“积累，比较和确定亚洲性质的工作首先谈到了弱势交易者相互交织的商业和流行病学问题”（第309页）。因此，我们没有去尝试与欧洲科学革命的经典一起阅读Coloquios，而是直接将Orta的文本视为“十六世纪中叶果阿生活繁华，可能性和不确定性的一部分”，果阿拥有丰富的商业和商业知识。治愈的可能性，但也带来经济和流行病学的不确定性”（第65页）。

这本书分为三个不平等的部分，按地域和按时间顺序排列。第一章由一个单独的章节组成，着眼于[End Page 164]海岸上的葡萄牙探险。15世纪中叶到16世纪中叶的西非。在此期间，葡萄牙旅行者和商人竭力应对似乎曾经一度权威的古典知识的反驳。亚里斯多德（Aristotle）和其他人认为，热带之间存在一个没有生命，干燥，干旱的地区-干旱地区。取而代之的是，葡萄牙人发现了一块葱郁的土地，这片土地的生机勃勃造成了医学上的难题。在生活似乎如此丰富的地方，为什么死亡，特别是由于使人衰弱的发烧而死亡，似乎同样充裕呢？在第二部分的原则所在地果阿也发现了同样明显的悖论。本章三章的主要主角是奥尔塔（Orta），卡格（Cagle）试图在两种主要是对立的理解他的贡献的方式之间寻求第三条路线。由于Coloquios是传递印度医学知识的一种手段，Cagle坚持以自己的立场和自己的立场来理解de Orta。当然，人们会把Coloquios视作一种汞合金，充满生气的宗教和社会政治影响了印度教和穆斯林医学以及来自多种背景的女性治疗方法的交往。然而，与此同时，Cagle的目标几乎是亲密的：“像Orta那样遇到果阿，凝视着……