European Theories and Local Therapies: Mordexi and Galenism in the East Indies, 1500-1700

Abstract

Abstract This article examines written accounts of the disease mordexi roughly between 1500 and 1700 to explore the conceptual frameworks and rhetorical strategies used by early modern authors to understand and present a local disease encountered in the East Indies to European readers. Europeans understood mordexi within a framework of Galenic medicine that both normalized the tropical affliction and distinguished it from other diseases. The cause and prevention of the disease were likewise explained through the effects of local flora and climate on the body. Native treatments for mordexi, however, did not fit so easily within Hippocratic-Galenic notions of restoring humoral balance and even challenged the superiority of European medical practitioners. The article concludes that the rhetorical strategies used by European authors to convey the efficacy of native healing practices point to the limitations of a Galenic framework and how writers worked around these conceptual limits.