The "reality of the knowledge and the ability instilled": climate, doctors, and public health in Brazil, 1808-1835.

Abstract

This article analyzes the efforts to build spaces for the medical community in Brazil since the transfer of the Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, through the country's independence process, until the creation of the Imperial Academy of Medicine, in 1835. Such initiatives affirm the prominence of medical-scientific knowledge in the face of traditional healing practices, as well as a hygienic agenda for the independent nation, strongly linked to the legitimation of local expertise in Brazilian climatology. Throughout this process, some medical leaders involved sought to affirm the convergence between the hygienic discourse and the interests of the nascent imperial state, while at the same time announcing the renewal of the mechanisms of legitimation of the career that, supposedly, started to be given by scientific merit instead of the patronage system typical of the Ancien Régime.