Abstract
The contributions of Brazilian physicians to knowledge of diseases caused by parasitic worms, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had distinct effects on three epistemic communities: Brazilian clinical anatomy, French medical geography, and the emerging field of medical parasitology. Accepting the heterogeneity of both the systems for legitimizing scientific facts and the epistemological practices observed by each discipline, the text provides a specific cartography of the period's medical knowledge, revealing the lines of force shaping the three disciplinary fields. The focus on the circulation, control and validation of medical knowledge reveals strong controversies and complicated negotiations between different epistemic communities.
Highlights
The contributions of Brazilian physicians to knowledge of diseases caused by parasitic worms, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had distinct effects on three epistemic communities: Brazilian clinical anatomy, French medical geography, and the emerging field of medical parasitology
Accepting the heterogeneity of both the systems for legitimizing scientific facts and the epistemological practices observed by each discipline, I aim to sketch a particular cartography of nineteenth-century medical knowledge, revealing the lines of force shaping three disciplinary fields and the ways in which these questioned or attracted the leading figures in medical helminthology, keen to see their research findings incorporated into the legitimized scientific spaces of the era
The epistemological discussion grew in prominence as medical geography, through the use of statistics, and helminth parasitology questioned the climatological aetiologies endorsed by the Brazilian medical authorities, loyal to the clinical anatomy and hygienist practices sanctioned by the faculties of medicine and the Imperial Academy of Medicine
Summary
Researcher at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/ Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Av. This focus on the circulation of knowledge – involving different circuits such as journals, scientific societies and congresses, all formally controlled by specialists – has revealed interesting aspects of the ways in which formulations accepted as scientific facts by a given speciality may become the subject of intense controversies and involve complicated negotiations when presented to other specialists (Benchimol, 1999; Kropf 2009) Pursuing this historiographic approach, the present article is based on research into the emergence of helminth parasitology as a field of study in the medical world of Imperial Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rather than taking the development of theories on the parasitic origin of the diseases as a natural and unproblematic moment in the advancement of scientific knowledge, we need to ask: how the scientific proposals formulated by the advocates of the parasitic origin of intertropical anaemia, hematochyluria and Arabian elephantiasis, involving hypotheses so alien to the institutionalized medical tradition, become epistemologically true? Put otherwise, how was their legitimacy acquired within the regional medical world of the period? In the absence of any universal tribunal, I present a sketch of the three arenas or systems of scientific authority which, by claiming for themselves a monopoly on validating and regulating the contemporary medical beliefs, had a direct influence on the directions taken by the controversy: clinical anatomy, medical geography and medical parasitology
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