SANTOS, M. J. B.; http://lattes.cnpq.br/8042886706127812; SANTOS, Maria José Bezerra dos.
Abstract:
The first half of the 20th century was remarked in Brazil for a range of changes
related to the structure of the cities, aiming at framing them inside the ideal of
modern civilization, what was also present in Paraiba. Thus, it was necessary to
dismiss practices considered by the idealizers and executors, from the mentioned
ideals, as retrogrades, old and superstitious. In this way of think, the healing popular
practices were considered incompatible to the changes that were implemented, due
to they were not transformed by the scientific principles that became the referential to
read the word. Thus, they would have to disappear. However, most of the population
did not experience the ideals of progress and modernity in the same way as the elite,
that is, they did not think that healing popular practices were pernicious, and they
should be extinct. This led the State authorities, justice, and other lettered to go in a
really war against the agents of the popular healing. Using persecution, prisons, and
medium publications, they tried to show to the population that medicine was the most
accurate way of healing. The analysis of the tense relationship between medicine
and quackery showed that the way the history of medicine was traditionally reported,
disregarded situations and actors that helped make this history, that was transformed
in a harmonic sequence of events without questioning or contradictions, and isolated
from the other ways of healing practices, otherwise it maintained close relationships,
influenced and it was influenced by the them.
