CONSTRUCCIONES NARRATIVAS DE LO HORRENDO Y CARTOGRAFÍAS CORPORALES DE LO DEFORME: ELEFANTIASIS EN COLOMBIA (1847-1868)*

This text aims to show how narrative of the disease was configured in the register of Colombian clinical thought between 1847 and 1868, with elephantiasis as the horizon for analysis. This medical panorama was manifested in José Joaquín García and Ricardo de la Parra, who are quoted here from a historical, anthropological and phenomenological perspective of the disease from a corporal cartography of the deformed in an embodiment (soma-psyche) of the pathological. In 1847 the doctor and naturalist José Joaquín García published a study on elephancy, a text that characterized the disease as a “solid disorder” and a “fluid congestion” in the “vascular extremities” that resulted in a “horrific appearance”; according to García, the term elephantiasis refers to a single pathological entity, which brings together both leprosy and elephantiasis. Between 1858 and 1868 Ricardo de la Parra published two studies on elephantiasis, seeing in it a fluid congestion that concludes in a monstrous transformation of the body. With these two authors, and it is the thesis of this article, it is evident a conception of elephantiasis that materializes a physical and moral degradation of the conditions of existence of the subjects who suffer from it.