This article considers the Jesuit action in the health domain and the healing arts in colonial Brazil. The curing hands of the Jesuits were a great anchor to colonial health. Since the beginning of its establishment and organization, the Company of Jesus in Brazil have incorporated this task among its arduous missionary and educational goals by keeping pharmacies and infirmaries in its colleges. The scarcity of licensed physicians trained in the medical schools of Europe, at least until the eighteenth century, the high price of drugs and remedies coming from Portugal and the East, and their frequent deterioration en route on merchant ships and in port warehouses, obliged the colonial physicians to revert to local natural resources and to the healing knowledge of the indigenous people.
Jesuits; Medicine; Christianity