BODILY RHIZOMATIC EXPERIENCES. THE FACES OF THE DEFORMED AND MONSTROUS IN COLOMBIA

Abstract

This text tries to show how the Colombian medical language of the late 19th and early 20th centuries makes the body an object of discourse under the rigors of deforming
disease or monstrous conformation linked to a specific field of knowledge: clinical semiology that captures the bodily rhizomatic experience of the pathological. A series of cases and reflections on tumor pathologies allow us to take a glimpse into the way in which clinical semiology involves a field of discursive operations between a plane of expression and a plane of content with the aim of making intelligible, within what can be conceived between the normal and the pathological, the body that displays the face of the deformed and the monstrous, not only before the eyes of the human being, but of a whole society disturbed by the uninformed, the disordered, the Other.