Contribuições para a História da Medicina Tropical nos séculos XIX e XX: um olhar retrospectivo

Abstract

This joined paper is the outcome of the 1st edition of a short course in History of Tropical Medicine that was held at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in April 2013, during the 2nd National Congress of Tropical Medicine. This course hosts a set of entangled agendas, which covers different geographical and thematic areas along the 19th and the 20th centuries. In this framework, three main topics are approached: the role of medicine in the building of empires, the history of Portuguese tropical medicine between 1902 and 1972, and the history of tropical medicine in Brazil, until the first decades of the twentieth century. We aim at discussing several questions relating to the production and dissemination of new medical theories that emerged in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, within the scope of Pasteurian theory and mansonian tropical medicine, and in the context of the construction of European and North-American imperialisms. We focus on a set of issues deemed as critical: the relationship among disciplines (bacteriology, parasitology, entomology, ecology), the institutionalization of new fields of knowledge, the association between medicine and imperialism, and the impact the new knowledge on the causes and means of transmission of tropical diseases had on public health policies. We hope to turn this exploratory mini-course into a broader one that will be able to engage students from different disciplines, as well as the lay public, interested on the history of tropical diseases as a mean to understand nowadays research in this area.