The Hospital-Colónia Rovisco Pais was inaugurated in Portugal in the 1940s for the treatment, study and prophylaxis of leprosy based on the compulsive internment model, whose configuration reflects the total institution concept proposed by Goffman. It concerns an important hygiene project of the Estado Novo. Its educative paradigm combined elements inspired in European social medicine and the ideology of the paternalistic Portuguese dictatorial regime. The Hospital Colony here will be thought of as a disciplinary dispositive, developing considerations regarding the confrontation between disciplinary power and experience. Memory emerges as a contingent instrument to access the practices and interstitial meanings woven into the Hospital Colony's daily life, seeking to find out about the experience of its former patients as political subjects.
Leprosarium; Disciplinary power; Moral regeneration; Experience; Agency
