Editor's Note

EDITOR'S NOTE

On the cover of this issue of História, Ciências, Saúde — Manguinhos, the reader will note the image of a man—a doctor or clergyman from a medieval burg—moving towards a building where a swaddled child lies on the steps and a candle glows on a nearby altar. This is part of an illustration from a manuscript of unknown authorship, printed in Portugal in the early sixteenth century. Here, healer and infirm meet by the light of a flame that symbolizes the Catholic Church's spiritual power, but the encounter also takes place in the shadow of secular power, represented by the royal arms and castle in the background. Handwritten in late Iberian Latin, Modus curandi cum balsamo explains how to use balm to heal wounds and how to treat internal injuries. With editions in Latin, French, English, and Portuguese, Regimento proveitoso contra ha pestenença is another product of medieval interpretations of Greek and Roman medical texts re-introduced in Europe by Arab authors. These two incunabula, which represent the extent of Portugal's known early-sixteenth-century medical library, were published by foreign printers.

Maria Carlota Rosa, philologist and linguist; Ana Thereza Basílio Vieira, Henrique Cairus, and Edwaldo Cafezeiro, classics professors; physician and historian Diana Maul de Carvalho; historians Jorge Prata de Sousa and Ricardo da Costa; Mariângela Menezes, who holds a doctorate in biological sciences; and Dante Martins Teixeira, with a doctoral degree in zoology, have presented the readers of Manguinhos with their extraordinary research into these two documents, which appear in these pages both in facsimile and in current-day Portuguese; Modus curandi has also been reproduced in archaic Portuguese, with modern typographical characters. This venture into sixteenth-century medicine is complemented by two articles that place Regimento proueytoso and Modus curandi in historical perspective. A scholarly glossary has also been provided, and will serve as a valuable tool in interpreting other texts from the era.

Our Analysis department offers something of a counterpoint to these documents which were printed in Portugal back when that nation was sailing the world's seas. Eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian medicine is featured though the story of one of its exemplary progeny, the physician José Pinto de Azeredo, who took his higher education in Edinburgh and Leiden, went on to practice in Angola, Rio de Janeiro (his birthplace), and Lisbon, and passed away there in 1810. The study is a collaborative effort by Manuel Serrano Pinto and Isabel Maria Malaquias, researchers at the Universidade de Aveiro; João Rui Pita, from the Universidade de Coimbra; and two Brazilians—Marco Antonio G. Cecchini and Lycia Maria Moreira-Nordemann—with Brazil's Institute of Aeronautical Technology and its National Institute for Space Research, respectively. In 1790, José Pinto de Azeredo published a pioneering study on the composition and quality of Rio de Janeiro's air. With a facsimile version included in these pages, the authors analyze Azeredo's study, which is pertinent not only to the history of medicine and of chemistry but likewise to the promising new line of historiography focused on the environment.

Three of this issue's articles deal with the field of psychology. Around 1930, La Castañeda—then Mexico City's main insane asylum—housed a massive number of chronic patients and had effectively become a warehouse for the sick, a status incompatible with its role as a treatment center and with the very role of psychiatry as a science. The anthropologist Cristina Sacristán, of Brazil's Mora Institute, analyzes how psychiatrists and other actors endeavored to correct the situation. Alexander Jabert, doctoral candidate at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, studies the management of madness during the First Republic. While various authors have delved into the relations between madness, society, and medicine, chiefly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Jabert has chosen an unexplored region: the state of Espírito Santo.

In Sources, Ana Maria Galdini Raimundo Oda and Paulo Dalgalarrondo, both from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, help erode this 'Southeast Brazil-centrism' with their research into the history of institutions for the insane created between 1846 and 1889 in five Brazilian provinces—São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Maranhão, Pernambuco, and Pará.

Benjamim Gomes, from the Universidade de Pernambuco, and Rita Barradas Barata, from the School of Medical Sciences at São Paulo's Santa Casa hospital, each approach the hot topic of ethics and medicine from a different angle. Based on texts by Foucault, Gomes shows how the French philosopher moves from a conception of power over others towards a conception of power rooted in the terrain of ancient Greek morality—the individual in relationship to himself. Taking a view at once historical and philosophical, Foucault has thus bequeathed us an ethical-humanistic interpretation of medicine, according to Gomes.

One expression of our disenchantment with our contemporary world comes in the form of questions surrounding the ethics of doing research on human beings. Rita Barradas Barata shows that every day health workers and researchers find themselves in circumstances that require them to make judgment calls of an ethical nature, although they lack any infallible guidelines for making such decisions. Barata posits that it is only by exercising critical consciousness on a daily basis that these professionals can perform their jobs within an ethical framework.

Our Analysis department ends with a fine study by Luiza Garnelo and Sully Sampaio, of the Universidade Federal do Amazonas, who examine the contradictions of globalization within the Amazon. On the one hand this process implements a massified, standardized productive base, while on the other it fosters the valorization of cultural differences and alliances between indigenous leaders, environmentalists, and other transworld actors. Ethno-political leaders are faced with a contradiction: their identity is diluted under the generic label of "engaged Indian" while at the same time they re-affirm their ethnic differences before Brazilian and world society. Nevertheless, as the authors show, the indigenous movement is a step ahead of other disadvantaged groups in the Amazon, who have no consistent strategies for negotiation with the world's powers.

Two studies are found in our Images department. Relying on photographic documentation left by Geraldo Paula-Souza, the historian Lina Rodrigues de Faria portrays the work of this sanitarian and physician when he was at the helm of the Institute of Hygiene (embryo of the Universidade de São Paulo's present Public Health School). Cardiovascular surgeon Paulo R. Prates explores the symbolism of the heart. Even before the blood-pumping role of this organ was discovered, it stood for life, courage, and reason; the author argues that these associations may derive from its resemblance to an ivy leaf, which in ancient times was a symbol of immortality and power.

Two environmental scholars have contributed a Research Note. José Luiz de Andrade Franco and José Augusto Drummond analyze the thought of Armando Magalhães Corrêa, author of O sertão carioca (1936) and member of a pioneering generation of Brazilian conservationists who defended the need to improve the living conditions of people in the interior of Brazil. Corrêa blended political, scientific, aesthetic, and social arguments to defend the preservation of nature, identifying this goal with the construction of a strong, modern nation.

The departments Books & Networks and Theses close out this issue with reviews of six recently published books and abstracts of half a dozen recently defended master's theses and doctoral dissertations.

We wish you all a happy holiday season. When we meet again in 2006, it is our sincere hope that the Brazilian people will have recovered the dreams and aspirations that were so disgracefully torn from them during the course of this past year.

Jaime L. Benchimol

Editor

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 Jan 2007
• Date of issue
  Dec 2005