On Slavery, Medicine, Speculation, and the Archive

In 1777, word spread along the Amazonian coast that the “cruel contagion of smallpox” was circulating in the Portuguese frontier captaincies of Grão-Pará and Maranhão.¹ Rumor often announced the arrival of smallpox before authorities.² The rumors wound their way along the roads and waterways of Belém, the capital of Grão-Pará, to the ears of thirty-three enslaved Africans, all of them property of Chief Physician Bento Viera Gomes. They were terrified of the ongoing outbreak—and of their enslaver. They knew of Gomes’s attempts to prevent the spread of smallpox by inoculating a group of soldiers stationed nearby. The soldiers refused the inoculations, fearing the disease and the procedure.³ To prove the procedure was safe and effective, Gomes conscripted the thirty-three to serve in an inoculation demonstration for the soldiers. As Gomes remarked, the enslaved people “(although equally fearful)…had no choice but to obey.”⁴ Each of them, between...