Admirável corpo novo: discursos médicos sobre as classes trabalhadoras (Paraíba, 1930-1945).

Abstract

In this thesis, we analyse the medical discourses about working classes which circulated in Paraíba between 1930 and 1945. Thus, we seek to problematize the unfolding of the doctor’s authorized speech about the social representations which were built around the worker’s image. Despite the social laws in period, the salaried classes in Paraíba went on facing difficult living conditions and high levels of work exploitation. Besides, the public health network and the social security system remained far too distant from Paraiba’s proletariat needs. Within this historical context, whether through the newspapers which circulated among the great public, or through their Medical Society, their conferences and their specialized journals, the doctors elaborated several discourses about the working classes’ health and diseases. Many times overlooking the structural reasons for the “maladies” which afflicted these groups, doctor’s from Paraíba represented them as a “sick organ”, which needed to be “healed” to restore health to the “social body”. In this sense, they produced diagnostics and proposed therapeutics with strong disciplinary content, searching to (con) form a “new worker”, who would supposedly be healthy, orderly and productive. In order to discuss these issues, we analysed mainly the daily newspapers which circulated through the state and medical journals produced by doctors from Paraíba. In addition to these documents, we have also based our work on laws and decrees about public health and sanctioned work relationships during Vargas’ first government. In the analysis of this documental corpus, we approach the theoretical references of Cultural History, especially as it refers to their formulations about the historical and social dimension of the “representations”. In order to problematize the relationships between the Brazilian State and the working classes during the getulian period, we dialogued with the notions of labour developed by Ângela de Castro Gomes, and “regulated citizenship” elaborated by Wanderley dos Santos. At last, based on the concepts of “disciplinary power”, “discursive device” and “biopolitics”, formulated by Michel Foucault, we discuss the participation of the medical knowledge in the social control politics which sought (yet not always achieved) to “govern” workers from Paraíba in the decades of 1930 and 40.