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The General State Archives in Samos hold the documents of the administrative service of the principality. At that time (1832–1912), Samos operated as an autonomous state subordinate to the Ottoman Empire; it was also the meeting point of often opposing worlds: the East and the West, Greece and the Sublime Porte. During this period, the Aegean Island gradually took on the substance of a state: a parliament, an autonomous administration, an education system, an official newspaper, a general chemical analysis laboratory, an import policy, etc. One of the crucial issues was the health of the citizens: the organization of health care and control of health structures, vaccination and prevention policies, the establishment and operation of a hospital, a leprosarium, local dispensaries, and lazarettos. The defense against epidemics (smallpox, cholera, typhus, etc.), and illnesses (leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, skin diseases, venereal infections), as well as the entire effort to build a health care system, were recorded in a language with a unique aesthetic, where literary and poetic testimony often produced significant ruptures with the codes of scientific or normative narration. These administrative texts and the density of the correspondence give shape to the place, highlight conflicts, and outline explicit, implicit, and unspoken geographies, as well as spatial relationships and contradictions. Their literariness gives them an unusual significance. They have the potential to be chronicles, dramaturgy, monologues, essays. Within this bureaucratic record, the suffering body, both individual and collective, as well as the remedy and the cure, reveal a spatial and cultural organization of Samos. The space of declaring and treating illness, the historical references, and the highlighting of the issues that arose at the time, demonstrate that the vector of figuration and representation of space, as well as its quintessential entity, is the body in itself— perishable, transhistorical, and above all, literary.