Yasmine Espert is an Art History PhD student at Columbia University specializing in the arts of the Caribbean and its diaspora.
November 6, 2014
Imagine Lima, Peru, in the 1800s. In this city of slaves, “free” persons, and colonial elites, a majority of the medical practitioners – doctors, surgeons, nurses – were of African ancestry. José Ramón Jouve Martín’s latest book, The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru, highlights this era’s most prominent black male physicians: José Pastor de Larrinaga, José Manuel Dávalos, and José Manuel Valdés.