The 1895 regulations on Portugal’s colonial health services described “medical statistics” alongside “climatological and ethnographic studies” as “the basis of all scientific colonisation.” Megan Vaughan argues that colonial medical discourses in Africa constituted ‘the African’ (or ‘the native’) as an object of knowledge. The completion of medical tables documenting individual users of medical facilities and differentiating this population on various axes was a significant discursive practice that reinforced authoritative claims about Africans as distinct kinds of medical subjects. Focusing on the collection and the increasing standardization of data on the few people who used or were brought to colonial hospitals in Mozambique from the late nineteenth century, this paper suggests that closer attention to the form as well as the content of statistical tables produced by colonial medics can enrich our understanding of the production of colonial medical knowledge.

These practices of administration, accounting for the work of hospitals, however limited their number and scope, in a formally rational manner can be understood as self-consciously modern, state-like behaviour. But health department correspondence also reveals that in the years in which it was being so carefully standardized, this activity itself was upset in practice; colonial bureaucrats themselves had to be disciplined to behave as modern colonial subjects. Moments of failure in fulfilling the counting and classificatory responsibilities of a state, point to the frustrations of the colonial authorities in realizing their own vision of a modern state.

Tables on hospital ‘movement’ failed either to record or to impact directly the health of more than a fraction of the inhabitants of this precariously won territory. Still, they were infused with a biopolitical concern with observing and producing colonial subjects as members of a population. Tables don’t just enumerate; by defining they can also create. And in the reports published alongside hospital tables, colonial medics employed the data produced through these bureaucratic practices of record and measurement to produce narratives which explained the dangers which these ‘native’ subjects posed, to the colony as an organic whole, or to a community of colonial settlers imagined as bounded and independent, but also their terrible vulnerability to corruption and contagion.