The centennial celebration of the New Goa Medical-surgical School, held in 1942, glorified the institution's contribution to the consolidation of the Portuguese Empire in Africa. I observe the School from the perspective of the literature on medicine and empire, whose analyzes tend to view it as a tool for exercising biopower. I then question this hypothesis from the perspective of primary sources on the School's first decades, which paint a picture of frailty and administrative disregard that is not very compatible with an imperial project engineered to train physicians and disperse them throughout the colonies. I conclude that the School's creation stemmed from a process where local interests dominated, in a society where the categories "colonizer" and "colonized" were diluted within the complexities of social differentiation. It was with the twentieth-century rewriting of Portuguese colonial history that the narrative of imperial glorification appropriated the School.
medical teaching; medical schools; Portuguese Empire; India; colonialism; tropical medicine
