Recife: entre a sujeira e a falta de (com)postura 1831-1845

Abstract

This work intends to historicize the construction of the discourse of hygiene as a guide to structural changes of character, occurring in Recife, from 1831 to 1845. In considering the reports of travelers and chroniclers of the everyday reality, we have narrow streets and dirty, lack of drinking water and habits not civilized considered by the look of the "other". This scene contrasted with the ideas from Europe, in vogue at the time, which propagated the city as the "locus" of modernity, civility and hygiene. Examine the investment of public discourse and doctors in the construction of a new sensitivity on the dirt and the cleaning of Recife, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Embodied on the assumptions of Social Medicine, these words begin to materialize through the adoption of systematic measures directed to combat the garbage and sewage that infest the city, threatening the health of the population and hampering the economic transactions. It was around the discussion about the health conditions of the city that emerged answer some questions we are looking over the work. The edition of the Code of Municipal postures (1831) represented an attempt to standardize the urban space through devices prohibitive patterns occurring based as "unhealthy." We focus our analysis on the performance of doctors responsible for the creation of associations of consultative character, as the Council of Public Health (1845), which proposed establishing a constitution for the medical city. Observe that the legal provisions that were used in order to change habits on the health of urban space can tell us much about the subject and center on the very concept of health in the nineteenth century.