Historia, ciencias, saude--Manguinhos最新文献

For the past 150 years, Science has become central to public issues, arbitrating all aspects of human life and defining what is natural and rational. Teaching the history of science by emphasising its dynamics as a social institution and the resulting stakes in global, national, and local politics is crucial for understanding the contemporary world. This article describes a course in this discipline that challenges traditional Western perspectives to ask pertinent questions across all time periods and societies. Presented as a guided tour, the course encourages students to critically engage with science as well as its history.

This article discusses the technoscientific production of the zika virus and disease and some implications for the health field. Articles on zika published between 1952 and 2014 were analyzed. The elements of scientific statements were collected and organized in a logical-temporal sequence. Three epistemic-discursive moments in the constitution of zika were characterized: experimental object, epidemiological object, and emergent object. In this constitutive trajectory, the central and paradoxical role of technoscientific development was highlighted. As more specialized and advanced knowledge on and techniques for the virus and disease investigation were produced, more detailed, complex ways of understanding them were created, composing a scenario of greater risks and insecurity for the health field.

This paper examines the current scientific and sociopolitical discourse on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, focusing on Viral by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley and Breathless by David Quammen. These books present contrasting narratives, highlighting competition within the scientific community and conflicts of interest. Central to the debate are the Huanan Seafood Market and Wuhan Institute of Virology, with discussions that involve zoonotic spillover and high-containment lab research. Both sources stress the need to identify the origins of the novel coronavirus to prevent future pandemics, but they diverge on key aspects, particularly regarding the importance and risks associated with laboratory research on potentially pandemic pathogens.

The article describes the relationship between the Pan American Health Organization and mental health in the period from 1948 to 1990. It is based on sources produced by the Pan American Health Organization itself and the World Health Organization. The research argues that the Pan American Health Organization emerged as a key transnational agency in positioning mental health on the Latin American health agenda and, during the Cold War, contested prevailing conceptions of and approaches to this field of public health.

The text analyzes a literary polemic woven in the mid-nineteenth century in Portugal between an influential politician and some of the most prominent Lisbon physicians, which focused on the scientific and clinical statute of alternative medical systems. The study seeks to portray the clinical universe of the romanticism period, showing the clinical and cultural presence of medical systems such as hydrotherapy, homeopathy, animal magnetism, among other practices. The text also problematizes the medical pluralism of that period, an aspect that is tendentially undervalued in historiographical terms. Finally, it illustrates various strategies of scientific, curricular and institutional marginalization that enabled to banish such practices from universities and historiography itself.

Public research institutes in Brazil adopted the experimental medicine model as of the late nineteenth century. At the Butantan Institute [Instituto Butantan], the experimental perspective was a mark of Afrânio do Amaral's administration, between 1928 and 1938. Using the institution's own historical archive as its primary source, this study analyzes the Butantan Rural School Group [Grupo Escolar Rural de Butantan], understanding it as both a pedagogical experiment, an expression of the institution's experimental guidelines, and a model for the education movement implemented in the early 1900s by intellectuals and politicians from the state of São Paulo to mold a national identity based on "country man."

The article presents a study on the illustrations published in The Great Inventions, by the French popular science writer Louis Figuier, a book that circulated in Brazil as from the second half of the nineteenth century. The analysis indicated that the illustrations, often linked to Figuier's text, pictured the science as essentially empirical science, of great experiments, exclusively male. The conclusions in this article add new elements to the historiography on Figuier and his writings, now from the perspective of the visual sources.

The article emphasizes the urban reform interventions aimed at public health improvements in the city of Belém (PA) drawing on the actions of an emblematic social actor for this city during the second half of the nineteenth century: José Coelho da Gama e Abreu. The research used primary sources such as archives and books written by Gama e Abreu, journals, reports, letters and rare works of literature. The urban improvements highlighted a city governed by a bourgeois class rapidly rising due to the export of latex. These reforms provided the opportunity for social segregation in the urban fabric, establishing a new logic for the city.

Despite public condemnation after the defeat of Nazism, eugenic ideas continue to persist into the twenty-first century in different countries and contexts and with varying forms of intensity and support, as seen in events such as the covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd case, discourse by contemporary far-right populist governments, and the 2024 US presidential election. This interview with Professor Marius Turda, a prominent scholar in the field of race, racism, and eugenics, presents his work and his itinerant exhibition entitled "We are not alone: legacies of eugenics," aimed at specialised and non-academic audiences alike, and offers a historically informed account of our eugenic past, present, and future.

Exchanges between Brazil and the United States regarding children's health education in the early decades of the twentieth century led to the circulation of subjects, knowledge, and printed matters, involving agreements between government public health agencies, international agencies, and civil society organizations. This article presents a significant source for understanding the processes of production and transnational circulation of printed matters aimed at teaching hygiene and health notions: the Child Health Alphabet, an illustrated book in alphabetical format, published in New York and adapted into Portuguese by J.P. Fontenelle, a physician-educator who completed an internship at Johns Hopkins University with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.