“(F)uzão da luz da sciencia com os raios ardentes do Sol”: a cidade e seus corpos nos discursos higienistas do I Congresso Médico de Pernambuco (1909)

Abstract

The 1st Medical Congress of Pernambuco, in 1909, was configured as a meeting of professionals whose dialogues constitute a science that overlaps the city and the population, as well as an event that presented the marks of Pernambuco medicine in that period. Among a variety of themes, we focus our attention on two types of speeches that present a constant concern with hygiene. First, with public hygiene, regarding the issues of structure and sanitation in the city of Recife and the disposition of its inhabitants. Second, the speeches that debate the issue of human degeneration, dictating rules of conduct in the private sphere of personal relationships from an eugenics perspective, as well as in what involves criminality. The view of science would turn to a marginalized population, showing the emergence of a social practice of medicine. The objective of this research is to analyze these speeches produced by Congress, based on its Annals, observing the discriminatory processes and the power highlighted by the subjects who produced these discourses. Based on Discourse Analysis from the French line and from the Foucaultian perspective, we set out to expand the possibilities of understanding this historical moment, including discursive formation, the notion of subject, interdiscursivity, among other concepts and tools that are part of this study. From this work, we identified the profile of the medical elite in Pernambuco at the beginning of the 20th century and their perception of the city and their bodies.