Cutting Bodies, Reaping Souls: Catholic Medical Missionaries between Rome and East Africa around 1700.

This article examines the role of early modern Roman Catholic missionaries as medical missionaries, focusing on Franciscan friars sent to North-East Africa around 1700, particularly Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt. It challenges the common assumption that canon law prohibited Catholic clergy from practicing medicine, showing instead that missionaries like Theodor Krump received systematic medical and surgical training in Rome, were legally authorized to perform medical procedures, and used medicine strategically in their conversion efforts. Medicine served both as a practical tool for gaining access to local elites and as a means to facilitate spiritual goals, including secret baptisms, although it did not guarantee large-scale conversions. The article highlights the complex interplay between medicine, law, religion, and cross-cultural encounters in early modern Catholic missions, emphasizing the ambivalent status of medical missionaries within their orders and the broader political and cultural contexts of their work.