EDITOR'S NOTE
Dear readers,
This issue of História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos comes out shortly after the successful 13th National Seminar of the Brazilian Society of the History of Science (SBHC; Sociedade Brasileira de História da Ciência), held at the University of São Paulo's School of Philosophy, Letters and Sciences on September 3-6, 2012. For many years now, this has not only been the most important gathering for Brazilian researchers in the field but also a prime reference for scholars from other parts of the Americas and the world. It's hard to single out specific presenters or agencies that supported the body and its activities without committing an injustice to others, but we must surely thank Olival Freire, of the Federal University of Bahia, who is leaving his post as chair of the SBHC. We must also congratulate the event's dedicated organizers and the newly elected board, presided over by Márcia Regina Barros da Silva, of the University of São Paulo. We likewise salute the many professors and students at Casa Oswaldo Cruz who presented papers, and we pledge our support to the organizers of the next seminar wich we hope will take place in Minas Gerais two years from now. In São Paulo, we enjoyed the opportunity to listen to, learn from, and converse with our colleagues, sharing an intellectual complicity that we feel certain is reflected as well in História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos.
The articles in this issue evince the journal's diversity and its holistic understanding of the history of science, health, and medicine. A valuable research study by historian Regina Horta Duarte and Güydo Campos Machado Marques Horta, an undergraduate in biology, recognizes the work of zoologist Rudolf Barth, who, in a display of an early concern over environmental destruction, took part in two expeditions organized by the Brazilian Navy in the late 1950s to a remote and small Brazilian island in the southern Atlantic that boasts remarkable flora, geology, and fauna. This noteworthy study is complemented in Sources Section by Ortrud Monika Barth and Cristina Engel de Alvarez. Both texts suggest metaphors for contemporary environmental dilemmas and underscore the import of the history of science today, namely, the significance of a long-range perspective and of interdisciplinarity in shedding light on the challenges of environmental sustainability.
Our Sources Section also offers an interesting debate about some of the ideas of a renowned U.S. specialist in the social study of science and technology, Sheila Jasanoff, whose books and articles are indispensable to understanding the interaction between science, on the one hand, and power and the legal order, on the other. Her work explores, among other topics, the convergence of biology and industry (e.g., patent regulation, reproductive technology, and cloning), the climate change debate, and the conjoined debates of scientists and politicians in modern democratic societies, all from a transnational perspective.
These are only some of the valuable texts that appear in these pages of História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos and that different readers may find more or less helpful to their research, university classes, or store of knowledge.
Recently, the journal has been receiving more submissions than it can reproduce. We appreciate the authors' endeavors and patience, and we know that one of their requests is that we speed up the editorial process so submitters may know about the fate of their articles as quickly as possible. We would also like to thank our peer reviewers for their vital, and anonymous, efforts to squeeze into their crowded calendars in the shortest time possible the careful reading of the material we send their way. We would like to reiterate our commitment to substantially reduce submission wait time, without sacrificing due care in evaluations or the revisions by authors that are often required, along with the other editorial work needed to publish an article of the best quality. We will likewise be placing more emphasis on posting articles on the Scielo site ahead of print, so that definitive, approved texts (in editorial and content terms) are available to the public prior to their publication in the journal's pages along with other articles.
We would like to ask that prospective authors help us by always bearing in mind that our emphasis is on the trinomial "history-science-health", with a clear tendency to accept articles which rest on the first of these terms, that is, which analyze science, medicine, or health from a historical perspective. We also ask that submitters read attentively the "instructions to authors", where we describe the journal's characteristics and sections, in order to make sure their manuscripts meet all prerequisites, from content and length to the precise formatting of citations and the clarity of images and captions. Lastly, we ask you to remember that we publish not only articles and book reviews but also documents, research notes, letters, images, interviews, and other material (under the obvious condition that these are unpublished, relevant, and pertinent to our trinomial).
We would like to close this letter by announcing the coming publication of a fascinating special issue on health and slavery, a topic that has sparked the interest of historians of medicine in recent years and that we are certain will interest all of our readers.
Marcos Cueto
Scientific Editor
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
08 Oct 2012 -
Date of issue
Sept 2012
