The hospitalization of the indigenous population in Mozambique in the first half of the 20th century – reflections based on the IHMT’s collection of architectural scale models

• Autor(a) principal: Couto Duarte, João Miguel
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Saraiva, Paula Cristina, Doria, José Luís
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.25761/anaisihmt.294

The museum of the Portuguese Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine houses some scale models of medical facilities built in Mozambique in the first half of the 20th century in small villages to serve the indigenous population. Those facilities were intended as part of a network of medical assistance designed by the physician Francisco Ferreira dos Santos in the early 1920s that should cover the whole province. The similarity found between some of those facilities confirms the adoption of a common set of organization principles. However, the coexistence of different ways of hospitalizing the population, either in huts, or in wards, that can be confirmed by confronting the scale model representing the Medical Facility of Maputo with the one representing the Hospital of Bilene, raises the need of a reflection on how the acculturation of the population to which those facilities were meant to was accessed. Under the attention paid to the acculturation that seems to guide the option for each one of those ways of hospitalization, one must find the State’s conviction on the rightfulness of the imposition of its power as a colonizing nation. The medical and the architectural options that mark those facilities are eventually underpinned by political ones.