Cordoaria Nacional (Colonial Hospital and School of Tropical Medicine)

On 24 April 1902, a charter of law (carta de lei) created, at the same time, the School of Tropical Medicine and the Lisbon Colonial Hospital. Both were housed in this building, the former Royal Ropeworks (Real Fábrica da Cordoaria): the school in the eastern wing, the hospital in another part of the building, under joint management — the wards served the teaching, and the school’s laboratories supported the clinical work.¹²

The hospital, which belonged to the Ministry of the Colonies, treated civil servants and military personnel “who were returning from overseas in deplorable physical condition with infectious diseases”.² The school, the fourth school of tropical medicine created in the world, organised scientific missions to the colonies and, with the hospital, taught the doctors who were going to serve in the “Ultramar” (overseas); its museum brought together material “collected in the Colonial Hospital and in the Hospitals of the overseas provinces”.³²⁴ In 1935 it was renamed the Institute of Tropical Medicine.⁴

Between 1943 and 1966, some women published research in the Institute’s Anais (Annals) — Gabriela Lopes Pinto, Palmira Coelho Rombert, Maria Margarida Gonçalves Pequito, Maria de Matos Faia — nearly always as co-authors with male colleagues; the institution’s official history barely mentions them. One of these studies, signed by Gabriel Jorge Janz and Gabriela Lopes Pinto and published in 1953, analysed the breast milk of women in São Tomé.⁵

In 1925 the hospital began to move to buildings of its own, further along Rua da Junqueira, with the Macau Pavilion, so called because it was built at Macau’s expense; it became the Overseas Hospital (Hospital do Ultramar) and since 1974 has been called Egas Moniz Hospital. The Institute only had a home of its own in 1958, also in Junqueira.¹² Since 1997–98, the Cordoaria building has housed the Navy Historical Archive.⁷