Theodor De Bry's Representations of the Americas and Indigenous Agency: A Reframing of Timucua Medical Practice.

Theodor De Bry produced popular engravings of the Americas, Asia, and Africa for his published accounts of faraway places, constituting some of the earliest European ethnographic accounts. It has long been established that early ethnographic writing often portrays non-Europeans through a colonialist lens, adding fabricated feature such as cannibalism. At the same time, the early modern world was contending with new disease vectors and new treatments for those diseases. This paper reframes De Bry's images of the Timucua peoples of modern-day Florida and their medical practice, which had theatrical and othering features, to capture an Indigenous perspective of medical care. Prints and accompanying inscriptions of the Timucua are then compared to De Bry's satirical images of European medical care. De Bry's visual and textual depictions of the Timucua are intended to render the Timucua legible to his European audiences but based on early modern accounts of the Timucua and other known Indigenous medical practices, there are aspects of De Bry's representation that map to actual Timucua medical cultures. Although contemporary viewers must be aware that De Bry intervened in the accounts and some of it is fantastic, it is nevertheless worthwhile to recapture some of the actual historical conditions of the Timucua as represented in De Bry's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]