Abstract
In 1875 Bahia, medicine and evolutionism were used by the physician, journalist, and republican militant Domingos Guedes Cabral as ideological weapons to propose a radical program of social reforms in Brazil in the areas of education, marriage control, medical care to the alienated, changes in the penal system, etc., all of which were based on the scientific knowledge of that time. Among the social ideas of Guedes Cabral, the question of race will be the main focus of this analysis. In this sense, Domingos Guedes Cabral is a particularly significant example for understanding the initial steps in the peculiar alliance between evolutionism, medicine, and scientific racism in Brazil since the 1870s, when Darwinism first arrived in the country.
Highlights
Appearing only shortly after the trailblazing public defense of Darwinism in 1875 by the Rio physician Augusto Cesar de Miranda Azevedo (Colicchio, 1988; Carula, 2009; Waizbort, 2012), Cabral’s text presented evolutionist ideas and their social implications within the stillnascent Brazilian scientific community that was forming in institutions like the two medical schools extant in the country at that time, in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro
The decision to reject the dissertation Cabral had submitted to obtain his degree as a doctor from the Bahia School of Medicine was an exceptional one; this is the only known case of a doctoral thesis2 being rejected at that college during the entire nineteenth century (Almeida, El-Hani, 2010)
The polygenist thinking of the evolutionist anthropology that Cabral embraced dominated the anthropological societies of many western countries at the end of the nineteenth century (Arteaga 2007a, 2007b, 2008), because of the enormous influence of Paul Broca and the Parisian Société d’anthropologie he founded in 1859 (Petrucelli, 1996; Faria, 1952; Santos, 2012)
Summary
Researcher, Grupo de Pesquisa em Ensino de História e Filosofia das Ciências Biológicas, Instituto de Biologia (IB)/UFBA. ARTEAGA, Juanma Sánchez; ALMEIDA, Ronnie Jorge Tavares de; EL-HANI, Charbel Niño. The issue of race in the work of Domingos Guedes Cabral. Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, v.23, supl., dez.
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