Beyond the Image of the Pain of Others

 Medical Research Experiments at the Colonial Hospital of Lisbon in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

This paper discusses the experiments with human subjects in clinical trials related
to the investigation of African human trypanosomiasis at Lisbon’s Colonial Hospital
during the first decades of the twentieth century. The research draws on evidentiary
photographs and archival documents produced by leading Portuguese tropical
medicine researchers. At the beginning of the 20th century, the first Portuguese
medical mission went to Angola and São Tomé to study African trypanosomiasis.
Images of ill persons, some of them in near-death condition, illustrated the
mission’s report. The investigation about sleeping sickness continued in the recently
inaugurated School of Tropical Medicine in Lisbon, where instruction and research
on exotic pathologies relied on clinical cases brought to the metropole. Since 1903,
the colonies’ health departments sent patients affected by tropical diseases to the
Colonial Hospital in the Portuguese capital. Flies of the Glossina genus, identified
as the causes of the illness, were also shipped for medical entomology studies.
Ayres Kopke, professor of bacteriology and parasitology at the School of Tropical
Medicine, was responsible for the institution’s insect collection and was one of
the leading “sleeping sickness” researchers. In Kopke’s files, kept at the Hospital
archive, a few portraits of Africans lay among photographs of flies and protozoa.
The portraits of Africans at Lisbon’s Colonial Hospital are evidence of life stories
that intertwine with the history of tropical medicine in the context of colonial
empires.