O "terrível flagello da humanidade": os discursos médico-higienistas no combate à sífilis na Paraíba (1921-1940).

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the medical-hygienist discourses in the fight against syphilis in Paraíba during the period from 1921 to 1940. The medical statements made about the disease will be problematized, with emphasis on educational practices based on the concern with hygiene care. body and especially sexual. Signified as a sexual plague, the spread of this disease was directly associated with sexual addictions and prostitution, mobilizing medical discourses in favor of a hygienic education for the incorporation of healthy sexual habits and practices by the population. Urged the need to make the bodies of men and women of Paraíba healthy, to promote healthy marriages from the hygienic and eugenic point of view, in order to protect the child from the harmful consequences of hereditary or acquired syphilis, safeguarding thus, future generations. In this context, the public authorities invested in sanitary facilities and public health policies based on a model of social medicine, with the construction of anti-aircraft dispensaries in the capital and the interior of the state to combat the “terrible flagello of humanity” that eroded the population of Paraíba. Flipping through the print pages of the time, readers could also gain access to healing practices from drug advertisements and medical treatments with specialists who promised to cure syphilis. I seek to problematize the sensitivities of the diseased bodies affected by syphilis in the first decades of the twentieth century, revealing the negative stigmas that were associated with the disease that further weakened these historical subjects. The main sources that make up the documentary corpus of the research are printed periodicals that circulated in Paraíba in the period, such as the newspaper A União, some magazines such as Era Nova and Medicina, as well as official documents such as the President's Reports and Service Reports. Sanitation and Rural Prophylaxis, in order to understand the speeches that were stated about syphilis. The discourse analysis based on what was proposed by Michel Foucault (2012) is used as a methodology, making it possible to problematize the interests and power relations that produced statements about the disease in Paraíba. By discussing how the discourses were elaborated, the historian appropriates the senses present in the sources and produces new meanings by stating and establishing the interpretations of the events that he elaborates in his discourse. Concepts such as social medicine, discursive formation, discipline and biopolitics, postulated by Michel Foucault (2008; 2013; 2014; 2015), Susan Sontag's notion of disease as a metaphor (2007) and stigma from Goffman (2013) permeate the whole discussion, contributing to historicize the morbid phenomenon of syphilis in Paraíba.