Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Médicos intérpretes do Brasil

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3934060

1527-1900

Ian Read,

Translation Studies and Practices

Médicos intérpretes do Brasil reveals a surprising fact: Brazil has the largest and most organized community of professional historians dedicated to medicine. Evidence can be found in the scope of this book: 640 pages and 27 essays, each written by a different scholar and paired with a historical document. Almost all the contributors are Brazilian, most have doctoral degrees and teach history of medicine at the university level, and at least half have been affiliated with the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), a giant research institution and graduate program that employs about 20 historians. In comparison, Johns Hopkins and Cambridge, with the two largest history of medicine programs in the North Atlantic, would need to combine their faculties to rival the size of Fiocruz's program. This book also reveals the question that has guided many of these Brazilian researchers: How have their country's doctors and hygienists influenced and represented Brazil as a society and a nation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries? In pursuing an answer through the biographies and ideas of more than two dozen former doctors and health experts—some well known and others nearly forgotten—Médicos intérpretes do Brasil is as much about nationalism. In sum, the book offers a useful encyclopedic guide to two communities: the nation's important doctor-anthropologists and historians of medicine researching Brazil today.Two themes emerge that help explain the book's purpose, the history of medicine within this continental nation and sometimes authoritarian state, and the guiding interests of a large and flourishing subset of Brazilian academia. While eugenics and racism were harnessed to legitimate colonialism, exploitation, and genocide by Europe and its offshoots in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Brazilian doctors were relatively more sympathetic, believing that social equality and a modern, civilized nation were possible through hygienic education and sweeping public health reform. There were notable exceptions, such as Nina Rodrigues and Renato Kehl, and certainly a great deal of pessimism. Yet even when Miguel Pereira infamously labeled Brazil “a giant hospital” in 1916, he did not explicitly attribute any national affliction to innate (biologically racist) attributes of its population, most of whom descended from colonized indigenous peoples and former African slaves (p. 117). Nevertheless, most Brazilian doctors were drawn from a small, elite minority and were overwhelmingly white (branco) and male (as they still are today). Women and people of color rarely had a chance to enter the profession, let alone rise to public influence, as demonstrated in the chapters on Juliano Moreira and Francisca Praguer Fróes. In this we see a long tradition of denying biological difference in human capacity within official and popular discourse, even as most Brazilian institutions maintain a white male monopoly over power and prestige.The second theme also involves metaphors of the nation. In Brazil or elsewhere, public health projects directed by the nation-state are by their nature teleological and constitutive. The nation as a living organism and the pathologies of the patria have assumed a distinctive form in Brazil due to the importance of its immense and nebulous western and northern frontiers. Brazil's colonial population, its largest cities, and its entry points for a Europhilic elite all coalesce around a clearly delineated coast, but its backland frontier was mostly defined via the difference between city and country, culture and nonculture, knowledge and ignorance, and health and illness. A good example is Juscelino Kubitschek, a medical doctor and the nation's president (1956–1961) who pushed through the construction of Brasília 500 miles from the coast. Brazil was no “giant hospital” to Kubitschek, but progress (read national health) would need to be unlocked through DDT, airplanes, and greater willingness by urbanites to embrace their caboclo (hillbilly) brothers. Others like Afrânio Peixoto, Samuel Pessoa, Arthur Ramos, Mário Magalhães, and Noel Nutels published work that spanned the twentieth century yet shared a view of national health and civilization as two sides of a single coin forged from mostly base materials by a necessarily centralized and powerful state. It is no surprise, then, that Brazilian doctors have provided much comfort for authoritarianism or were seen as threats when they voiced their opposition. Nise da Silveira, Josué de Castro, and Hélio Pellegrino were among a number of doctor-politicians arrested or exiled for that reason.The book has two odd omissions. There is no chapter for either Oswaldo Cruz or Gilberto Freyre, although both were highly influential doctors of the nation. Furthermore, the introduction is terse and a conclusion absent, demonstrating that the book's purpose is more encyclopedic than interpretive. Its chapters are tacitly interconnected, often by their position within debates and on ideas that stretched across the Atlantic, but a reader will need to turn to the large and growing body of research by these 27 contributors to learn how. Fortunately, 34 pages of bibliography provide a good guide. Finally, Médicos intérpretes do Brasil and the large group of academics that it showcases focus primarily on the twentieth century. There may be no other country in the world with a more cohesive and active academic community of historians of medicine, but too few among them work on the colonial and early national periods. Thus, we now better understand the intriguing ways that powerful people doctored this national body, but we have little sense of the origins of its ills.