Doctors, folk medicine and the Inquisition: The repression of popular healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment era

Inquisition trials for sorcery and witchcraft in Portugal reached a peak between 1715 and 1755, quite late by European standards. This study of the circumstances surrounding those events focuses on the Inquisition's role in prosecuting and discrediting popular healers (called saludadores or curandeiros), who in eighteenth-century Portugal were charged with the centuries-old laws that condemned the practice of witchcraft and sorcery. Throughout the seventeenth and much of the sixteenth centuries, cases against so-called witches rarely came to trial in Portugal. However, Inquisition cases against folk healers jumped dramatically during the reign of João V (1707–1750) and continued steadily into the Pombaline epoch (1750–1777). During this period, in approximately sixty percent of Holy Office trials in which the culprit was accused of a magical crime, that individual was actually an illicit healer who provided folk remedies to peasants, mostly in the countryside. Such cures relied on illicit acts of sorcery for their efficacy. These “witchcraft” cases reflect a growing lack of tolerance for folk healers among the previously indifferent Inquisitors, an intolerance that resulted in a policy of systematic oppression during the middle years of the eighteenth century.; Significantly, this period of heightened witchcraft persecution in Portugal coincides with the entrance of university-trained physicians and surgeons into the paid ranks of the Inquisition in unprecedented numbers, taking up employment as familiares (lower-level functionaries) to enjoy the enhanced status and privileges consequent to such a post. State-licensed physicians and surgeons, motivated in part by professional competition but primarily by a desire to promote rationalized “scientific” medicine, used their positions within the Holy Office to initiate trials against purveyors of superstitious folk remedies. This repression of folk healing, then, reveals a conflict between learned culture and popular culture in Enlightenment-era Portugal, and shows that modernist ideas about rationalized empirical medical practices had penetrated the minds of learned elites to a degree that even the policies of the Inquisition changed to accommodate, and even promote, a more scientific approach to healing. In this rare instance, the Inquisition functioned as an instrument of progressive social change.