Esculápios tropicais: a institucionalização da medicina no Pará, 1889-1919

Abstract

This thesis fits into a proposal to revive the social history of medicine in Pará in a new perspective. Analyse the construction of the power and prestige of medicine and medical science in society paraense in the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century is the main objective of this work. The intention is to show that, far from enjoying a hegemony in the world of healing and have an inherent power capable of shaping the society of the time, the doctors still faced enormous difficulties to legitimize their science among the most diverse social categories. While the republican authorities, in the name of "civilization" in the tropics, followed with its policy of hygiene of urban space and fight against epidemics, the paraense population still in search of relief from their problems in the traditional arts of healing. However, if the medicine is popular up in one of the biggest obstacles to the affirmation of medical academics as masters of healing, the disunity, lack of ethics and consensus within the medical profession not ceased to be some of the significant factors of discrediting that hung over the figure of official representatives of medicine in full Brazilian Republic. To address many problems, doctors, little by little, trying overcome their differences and created rules and ties of solidarity able to unite them around the common goals, consolidating identity of a group which strengthened its corporate and fought for power and prestige they both aim.