Abstract

CARDONA RODAS, Hilderman. Clinical Experience in Colombia with Cases of Monstrosity and Deformity. Relac. Estud. hist. soc. [online]. 2011, vol.32, n.126, pp.171-202. ISSN 2448-7554.

This study focuses on the medical practices in late 19^th-century Colombia as they related to cases of monstrosity and deformity; practices that brought into play enunciative modalities that classified certain bodies that were perceived as morbid, deformed or monstrous. Viewing and discussing illnesses characterized by deformities propitiated practices and discourses that operated in accordance with certain rules of morphology that emerge from clinical records. Such deviated structures supposed a questioning of two orders: one grammatical, the other biological, which were inscribed in problems that fell somewhere between normal and pathological states. Teratology and clinical thinking thus came together to establish statutes on monstrosity and deforming diseases. One text on illnesses that caused deformities and anomalous forms employed purely graphic means to distinguish between pathological and normal conditions, based on an enunciative efficacy in the exercise of the clinical perspective.

Keywords : deformity; monstrosity; normal; pathological; clinic; teratology.