This text aims to unite two neglected
areas of study in Colombian medical
historiography: disfiguring disease and
the concept of climate. It seeks to show
how physicians in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries in
Colombia associate a clinical semiology
of disfiguring disease with the influence
of certain climatic and hereditary
conditions. Characterizing disfiguring
disease associated with climate implies
revising the way in which, at the close
of the nineteenth century, medical
discourse constructed etiological
explanations using the applied
rationalism of the period. Thus, the
ideal pathological terrain was both the
body of the patient and the territory
he or she inhabited.
