Abstract
The article explores the impact of malaria on infrastructure works--above all, railroads--under the republican drive towards modernization. Railways helped tie the territory together and foster the symbolic and material expansion of the Brazilian nation. The scientists entrusted with vanquishing such epidemic outbreaks did not just conduct campaigns; they also undertook painstaking observations of aspects of the disease, including its relations to hosts and the environment, thus contributing to the production of new knowledge of malaria and to the institutionalization of a new field in Brazil, then taking root in Europe's colonies: "tropical medicine." The article shows the ties between these innovations (especially the theory of domiciliary infection) and the sanitary campaigns that helped the railways, which in the 1920s were followed by a new phase in Brazil's anti-malaria efforts.
Highlights
We analyze the relation between railroads, disease, and tropical medicine from the 1890s to the 1920s, with our focus on malaria
The period in which the First Republic was instated and reached its apex was characterized by the strengthening of scientific institutions founded in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, which played a fundamental role in research and in the practical initiatives meant to overcome roadblocks to the capitalist economic and social expansion flourishing along Brazil’s coast
If Brazilians were noteworthy among hunters of the latter microbe, the most credible theory about malaria first came from Italy
Summary
Plasmodium vivax, responsible for benign tertian; P. malariae, for quartan; and P. falciparum, which causes the most serious form of the disease, known in the early twentieth century as tropical malaria, acute tertian fever, or estival-autumnal fever. 13 After joining the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1899, Ross took part in expeditions to study and combat malaria in Sierra Leone (1899 and 1901) and in Lagos (1901) He published Instructions for the Prevention of Malarial Fever (1899), Mosquito Brigades and How to Organise Them (1902), and The Prevention of Malaria (1910); available at sca.lib.liv. 156, of 1890, made it mandatory to draw up a general transportation route plan that would include all Brazilian roads to be explored by concessions It was only in April 1931 that a commission of technical specialists was appointed to draw up such a plan, instituted in the Vargas era under Decree 24.497, of June 29, 1934. The state government and Oswaldo Cruz agreed upon the yellow-fever campaign he would conduct months later, in Belém, with the help of the physicians and mosquito brigades that had combated the disease in Rio de Janeiro.
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