This article explores the routes followed by ideas and practices related to the body emerging in seventeenth-century Caribbean locales like Cartagena de Indias and Havana. Mobile and interconnected Spanish Caribbean ritual practitioners of African descent, using oral tradition, performance, and material culture, functioned as the most important links for the diffusion of ideas about corporeality in the region. Within their epistemological realms, black healers experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and incorporated practices they learned from practitioners coming from all over the Atlantic. Their history is a showcase for alternative models concerning the production and circulation of knowledge around the body in the seventeenth-century Atlantic. Their health practices were not uniquely, or even mainly, framed around strategies to resist or react to slavery, capitalism or the Enlightenment. Instead, Spanish Caribbean healing practices and ideas were shaped by the imperatives of competition and social, cultural and economic adaptation.