This article explores the relation between bacteriology and medical geography in the 19th century in Colombia, following the case of fevers. Through this, it explains how historiography has approached the relation between bacteriology and medical geography, and analyzes said relation in the medical research pertaining to yellow fever, fevers of the Magdalena River, and malaria in the 1880s. Finally, it shows that, instead of passively incorporating bacteriology, the physicians fought to combine it with medical geography, incorporating elements of both approaches, keeping them in tense separation, or rejecting one in favor of the other.