The Great Medical Schism
I’ve been reading a long book titled Brazil, by Errol Lincoln Uys, that has captured my interest despite its wordiness. Uys’s writing reminds me of James Michener’s work – the fictional chronology examining a family and its progeny century after century as the country develops. In Brazil’s first chapter, the indigenous people, the Tupiniquin, are not treated as primitives but as a well-organized society of men and women involved in craft, hunting, tradition, and ceremony. The skill involved in their craftsmanship seemed nearly as developed as the labor of European guild workers. (My respect for the Tupiniquin was marred by the rapacious enmity they had for surrounding tribes. We would label them cannibals, but their cannibalism was conducted with care and deliberate regard for their elders.) The invading Portuguese and Spaniards judged these natives with no sensitivity, treating them as savages deserving to be captured and enslaved to the sugar plantations the colonists were establishing. Jesuit priests sought to convert the Tupiniquin to Catholicism and make them abandon their native lifestyle.
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