Disfiguring disease, degeneration and climate in Colombia, 1880-1920

Abstract

This text aims to unite two neglected areas of study in Colombian medical historiography: disfiguring disease and the concept of climate. It seeks to show how physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Colombia associate a clinical semiology of disfiguring disease with the influence of certain climatic and hereditary conditions. Characterizing disfiguring disease associated with climate implies revising the way in which, at the close of the nineteenth century, medical discourse constructed etiological explanations using the applied rationalism of the period. Thus, the ideal pathological terrain was both the body of the patient and the territory he or she inhabited.