The reports written by physicians employed in Angola and Mozambique colonial-era Health Services, so much as other funds related to Public Health held by National Archives in the two largest of Portugal’s former colonies in Africa, produced from the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, albeit filled with Eurocentric prejudices, are key to the understanding of the prevailing medical mindset at the time; the harshness involved in diagnosing exotic diseases and prescribing adequate treatments; as well as the strategies of physicians at the service of colonial administrations in order to win hearts and minds of the “native”, and the difficulties thereof. Furthermore, the accounts regarding natives’ resistance and the obstacles found in treading this “humanitarian and civilizing” path offer the opportunity for the voices of African colonial subjects to emerge, they who usually cannot express themselves directly through written sources. This paper seeks to investigate this documentation in search of such moments of tension ensuing the encounter

/ confrontation on the ground between Biomedicine-attached physicians and the “natives” and their conceptions of health, illness and healing.