The literature on the history of medicine, such as on the history of science in general, has been focusing on the study of the global circulation of knowledge, drawing attention to local processes. Considering this scope, it is worth examining the role of European doctors who performed in the colonial territories, which, having arrived there with several European knowledge, tried to accommodate them to new geographical, social, cultural and political contexts. Frequently far from the theory and the practice learned in European universities, these territories have become places of circulation, reflection and production of medical knowledge, often interacting with the local knowledge.

During the first half of the 19th century, the medical theories of hygienist tradition and Enlightenment formulation postulated a strong connection to the knowledge of the environment, and this spurred the investigation of these doctors on issues of health and disease in imperial societies in which they worked. In the case of Mozambique, then part of the Portuguese empire, the chief-physicians of the Royal Hospital, several of them non-Portuguese Europeans, tried to apply medical European knowledge in the territory, considering the environment and the diseases existing there. They saw medicine as a tool for the Portuguese rule in this region or just as a means for promoting the establishment of Europeans in a tropical environment. Anyway, they were not irrelevant actors of the colonial process.

The writings of some of these physicians, from health treatises, medical topographies or simple reports, the most part still in manuscripts, reveal attempts to accommodate European theories to the morbid circumstances found in Mozambique. Sometimes, this process required not only challenge certain ideas of the European medicine, but also a dialogue with the local knowledge, be this African or already hybridized by the colonial community.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the texts of some of the unknown doctors who acted in Mozambique during the first half of the 19th century, highlighting their role in the production of a colonial medicine. Based on their academic training, in the research they conducted in the colony and in their hospital practice, they produced new medical knowledge, unveiling diseases, trying new therapies and prescribing measures for individual and public health.