This documentary study aimed to investigate the 1875 publication of the "Iconografia dos Signaes dos Surdos-Mudos", the first sign language dictionary in Brazil. The author was Flausino José da Costa Gama, who had been a student of the Imperial Instituto dos Surdos-Mudos in Rio de Janeiro. Flausino's publication was analyzed in light of an earlier work, that Flausino reproduced in full, by Pierre Pélissier, a French deaf man. Understanding how the publication of this dictionary came about required historical contextualization of the history of education of the deaf, and research of the expansion of lythographic production processes in the second half of the twentieth-century. Both works were analyzed as to general aspect, how the lexical indexation was done, verification of the signs that have endured (38 in 382), translation errors from French to Portuguese and what these entries tell us about the underlying moral and religious precepts behind the education of the deaf at the time. The conclusion underlines the importance of the initiative of propagating Brazilian sign language and the first attempt at registering it one hundred and thirty seven years ago.
Deafness; History of Special Education; Sign Language
