Cutting Bodies, Reaping Souls: Catholic Medical Missionaries between Rome and East Africa around 1700

Abstract

Summary Research on medical missions has largely focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries paying comparatively little attention to earlier periods. The Roman Catholic Church in particular was seen as a latecomer in medical missionary work because canon law supposedly forbade clergymen to engage too closely with the human body. This article offers a different view of medicine and law in early modern conversion efforts and argues that some Catholic missionaries can be called ‘medical missionaries’. Looking at Franciscan friars sent to Ethiopia around 1700, the article analyses the legal negotiations surrounding the use of surgery by Catholic clergymen, healing practices they used during the missions and the relationship between medicine and conversion. It shows that missionaries received systematic medical and surgical training in Rome, that they used the acquired skills during their travels and that medicine was crucial to Catholic strategies of spiritual conquest.