Maus ares e malária: entre os pântanos de Natal e o feroz mosquito africano (1892-1932)

摘要

The development of epidemiological practices in the last years of the nineteenth andearly twentieth century was characterized by both an influence of medical geographyand the emergence of microbes and vectors of diseases. Both theories were used toexplain outbreaks in Rio Grande do Norte specially in Natal. In this process wereorganized new institutions linked to public health, unhealthy spaces and prescribedhygiene measures. The redefinitions of the spaces were linked to updated elements ofHippocratic medicine such as aerism and emphasis on medical topography. How thephysicians of the town were organized in the face of new meanings and fields ofexpertise in the demarcation of diseases and regulation of their own practices against theillegal medical practitioners? Likewise, the very occurrence of epidemics mobilizedpeople, urban institutions and apparatuses. But how the Hippocratic legacy that leads tothe idea of bad air originated by swamps from the eighteenth and nineteenth century hasbeen linked to new microbial assumptions and disease vectors in the early twentiethcentury? How an invader from Africa, (the mosquito A. gambiae) mobilizedtransnational efforts to combat malaria and redefined the epidemiological practices? Theaim of this work is to understand how epidemiological practices redefine the way wedefine spaces, practices and disease from both an approach influenced by a relationalhistory of spaces and a theoretical synergy which includes topics in Science Studies,Post Structuralist Geography and some elements of Feminist Studies. Documentaryresearch were surveyed in the reports of the provincial presidents, government posts tothe Provincial Assembly, specialized medical articles and theses, and documents fromthe Rockefeller Foundation and national and international journals. In this regard shallbe given to both material and discursive aspects of space-related practicalepidemiological that Natal as much (in general) Rio Grande do Norte between bad airand malaria.