Os labirínticos caminhos da cura: tensões entre a medicina científica e as práticas de curandeirismo na Paraíba (1920-1945).

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.