Entre Miasmas e o Anopheles: uma breve história da malária no alvorecer da república em Manaus (1898-1904)

Abstract

The first years of the Republic in Manaus were busy due to significant changes in the city's landscape, such as the construction and levelling of streets and the embankment of creeks. These events were propitiated thanks to the accumulation of capital from the latex trade, to the point where the city became known as the "Paris of the Tropics", given the cosmopolitanism that the city assumed with the rubber economy. At the same time as it expanded as a city, Manaus also saw the expansion of diseases such as malaria, which led to successive epidemics during the Belle Époque. In this article we will address how the disease gained a different visibility in relation to the provincial period, highlighting the reports of health authorities and rulers at the dawn of the Republic in Manaus. For that we will use the technique of discourse analysis in order to verify the changes and permanences in the understanding about the disease between 1898 and 1904. At the same time, we will verify how the recrudescence of the disease in the city brings, in tow, new clashes between Amazonian physicians in relation to the etiology and transmission of the disease, that is, from the idea of the mosquito as a vector in the early years of the twentieth century.