Abstract
The article analyzes the Notice de géographie médicale: quelques observations sur les maladies des indigènes des provinces de Lourenço Marques et de Gaza, written by Georges-Louis Liengme (1859-1936), reconstituting the confluence between medicine as a social practice and the civilizing paradigm that led him to travel to the south of the present territory of Mozambique in the year 1891. Mastering the clinical grammar based on the power of intervention and direct control over the individual, Liengme sought to decode the African universe by the sign of the disease and under the perspective of particularly sick bodies waiting for the action of governments and missionary societies. In order to intervene in this disorderly world of madness and blindness, his gaze turned to the referents capable of producing “connections of meaning” and “convergence of symbolic horizons” with the populations, but in this process, he advanced in toward one liminality that eventually subverted the sense of his own presence.
Keywords
Social medicine; disciplinary work; Swiss Mission; Mandlakazi; Gaza; 19th century; Mozambique; Georges-Louis Liengme