And what the study of public health tells us about the political history of empire. The public engagement framework enriches our understanding of Brazilian public health in the nineteenth century.
Engaging the Public in the Politics of Health
By substantiating these national goals, the Society of Medicine reinforced the public's interest in health policy. The Society's establishment of the gameleira medical prize for the year 1845 testified to the medical consideration of popular healing methods in scientific research for public health.154.
Leprosy and Protecting Health in the Rise of the Public Health Council
National and international research on uassacú, a plant from the northern province of Pará, has shown the direct influence of the population in the Brazilian pursuit of scientific knowledge production against leprosy. This chapter examines the role of public involvement in the outcomes of the cholera epidemic.
Negotiating Public Health amid an Epidemic Threat
Fonseca became a strong advocate of the lime juice treatment, and experiments with it forced the medical effort to assert relevance over it. Fonseca's publication also tried to emphasize that non-specialists could manage the disease successfully if they followed the doctor's advice on administering the juice.
Manipulating Epidemic Outcomes
As the municipal council intended to convince the population of the "true" causes of cholera, it turned health protection into a matter of social order, turning cholera into a disease arising from "wrong behavior" and a lack of emotional control. When the Central Council of Public Hygiene recommended preventive measures against cholera to the Minister of Imperial Affairs, Francisco Gonçalves Martins, in 1852, he acknowledged that, despite the “controversy among scientific minds as to the transmission or non-transmission of the disease,” the state should “consider it contagious. Preventing people's fear for social stability meant preventing additional problems in controlling the epidemic.
Manoel's popularity as a problem because it reflected the state's lack of control over how to manage the epidemic. In the midst of that moment of terror and despair, these drinks instilled "hope [...] in the people, because they believed that [Pai Manoel] would save them from the danger [of cholera]."357 In an attempt to justify Pai Manoel's rise among the population as an emotional decision, the then chairman of the commission for public hygiene dr. Figueiredo apologized for his actions to the Minister of the Empire, but showed that his intention was to convince the population that Pai Manoel was a fraud while pretending to accept his cure. methods for public prevention of social unrest.
In this case, Pai Manoel had to fail, so that the health officials, who were also unsuccessful in the treatment, would not be completely demoralized and delegitimized, especially since they were the main representatives of the government during the epidemic among the population. This decision represented two things: the failure of anti-contagionist rhetoric and the rise of social instability based on the disruptions they caused in the maintenance of basic services.
Labor and the Protection of Popular Health
When cholera invaded a commune in the province of Garanhuns on December 18, 1855 and spread to nearby communes and provinces, the population "frightened, migrated to the city of Victoria" because of the. Press reports on popular fear of cholera demonstrated social expectations towards the government directly related to the poverty of most of the population. At the heart of the issue was fear, both a preventive response to the epidemic and a problem for its management.
The government's seizure of private property has shown how health is intertwined with the country's politics and economic instability. She brought together different interpretations of health protection and showed that the control of the epidemic is imbued with political matters. There are public infirmaries And charitable hospitals But in the streets of the city.
This chapter examines the new dimensions of public involvement in health politics that emerged from the economic impact of the nationalization of public health between 1857 and 1870. The economic and scientific context of the time suggests that the government came to view disease treatment as economically more beneficial. than disease prevention.
Engagement in Public Health: Labor and Smallpox Prevention
During the yellow fever outbreak of 1862, the only whaleboat available was to transport the doctor to the vessels for the inspection of the sick and back to the hospital with victims for them. Antonio Felix Martins, at the court.459 Because several northern provinces demonstrated their dependence on Pernambuco's pus to vaccinate their own populations, such as Rio Grande do Norte, Alagoas, Paraíba, Maranhão, Ceará and Pará, it probably made the province critical for supplying the north with it, and thus under more pressure to maintain the pus stocks.460 Furthermore, the maintenance of the office was drastically hampered because, prior to centralization, the provincial treasury ensured that all the items and personnel needed to make it work were made available, such as pens, paper, needles and assistants such as a doorman and a messenger.461 With the dissolution of the council and the transition to the vaccination office. Fernandes requested the Provincial President Antonio José Saraiva to contact the Imperial Minister regarding the absence of vaccine liquid in the office, because none of the many requests he had submitted to the Vaccination Institute "on January 12 and February 17 and 26" had given rise to for an answer.464 As early as December 6, 1856, requests for pus from the Commissioner of the Vaccination Institute were often unfulfilled.465 Furthermore, the shipment of fluids from Paris and England, which, according to the Commissioner, used to be "frequent," had begun to suffer constant and unexplained delays.
Fernandes' attempt to contact these ministers was his last option after he had "made a similar request to the Inspector of the Vaccination Institute on the 6th of last month", who had not responded or fulfilled his request at that time.467 On the 17th. April 1863 "vaccination in this capital has been discontinued". The centralizing effect contrasted greatly with vaccination in the province during the existence of the Public Health Council between 1845 and 1851. Fonseca celebrated in 1851, he complained in 1854 as provincial vaccinator of the interruptions that were caused "in all the municipalities of the province, because no one wants to work for free, especially when one considers individuals who receive large sums and contribute very little to the state, and in a country where the means of subsistence are very expensive.”485 Challenges in getting vaccinators to carry out their duties after public health nationalization showed , that nascent provincial attempts to pay for their services stalled when the council was dissolved that year.
The financial constraints of the contemporary vaccination system forced officials to pursue alternatives between state employees and the population to meet provincial vaccination needs. Public commitment to vaccination services also depended on people's willingness to participate.
NUMBER OF THE VACCINATED PER YEAR IN RECIFE BETWEEN 1846 -
Transforming Unhealthiness into a Business
This final section explores how the centralization of public health created opportunities for the transformation of disease treatment into a business. The nationalization of public health led to a focus on imported diseases that would affect services provided to the poor. Growing interest in the pharmaceutical arena shows that disease is a core element of public health involvement.
The shift in priority to the treatment of disease re-marked engagement among multiple actors in public health during the 1860s. Public engagement revealed that public health constraints in Pernambuco in the 1860s were not related to state capacity, but to changes in state priorities. The state of public health neglect in the 1860s was based on political decisions about labor and the economy and shaped the kinds of engagement that constituted contemporary health policies.
Why public health officials and health practitioners pushed for a return to the policy of prevention in public health during the drought of 1877-79 against the public relief system. A public health analysis of the drought is a series of larger questions about the extent to which it led the government to reconsider disease prevention, especially if we consider that.
Exposing the Limits of Public Relief
Moscoso had sent homeopathic and allopathic ambulances (according to him, when the population wanted it) with instructions on how to heal "for those who are unknown to the [medical] profession." These served to convince the provincial government of the limits of public assistance to help them. In trying to transfer part of the burden with migrants to health care, the inspector showed how he became more resistant to the concept of public assistance.
For example, on 28 March 1878, the hospital's manciple wrote to the provincial president as a representative of ward staff complaining about the critical conditions in these rooms and how these affected ordinary patients. By transforming migrants into a nuisance and a potential threat to the city, health workers enforced the public health malaise associated with an unprecedented influx of labor derived from public relief. Augusto Trajano de Hollanda Chacon, filed a formal complaint with the director of the hospital regarding
The negative experience of health assistance during the drought showed health practitioners and support staff that public assistance to migrants was insufficient for them, and detrimental to the community and themselves. Moscoso wrote as one of his doctors to the director of the hospital to inform that dr.
Creating Negative Interpretations of Public Relief
For example, on April 24, 1879, the president of the Central Council of Public Hygiene, Baron Lavradio, with the repeated claims of the public health inspector Dr. Moscosa demonstrated a complete loss of control over the consequences of drought in the urban area. A brief look at this reform shows us that the central government is more accepting of the public health principle of health protection through prevention.
The last decade of the empire thus saw several changes in public health not seen since the 1850s. Even as we acknowledge the power imbalances in this relationship, we cannot deny the importance of the public in the direction that public health initiatives took from the 1840s to the 1870s. . Peard, Race, Place and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 17.
236 Fonseca, Coletânea de Obras do Conselho Geral de Saúde Pública da Província de Pernambuco, outubro. 238 Fonseca, Coletânea de Obras do Conselho Geral de Saúde Pública da Província de Pernambuco, outubro. Barnes, "Carga, 'Infecção' e a Lógica da Quarentena no Século XIX", Boletim de História da Medicina 88, no.
734 Fonceca, Coleção de Obras do Conselho Geral de Saúde Pública da Província de Pernambuco, 4º ano.
