A casa de Deos se tem tornado um foco de podridão e peste!”: a emergência dos cemitérios públicos no Ceará em meio aos jogos de poder entre igreja-estado-medicina nos anos de 1850.

Abstract

The present work analyzes the construction of public cemeteries in the state of Ceará involving the game of power concerning the church, the state and the medicine in the years of the 1850’s. As source of analysis we have the report of the President of the Province, the imperial law of the constitution of the city council of 1828, the newspaper O Cearense, the letters from the sanitary committees, the letters issued the doctors to the President of the Province, the provincial law of prohibition of burials at churches and the cemeteries regulation, the magazine from Instituto do Ceará and the book written by the doctor Liberato Castro Carreira. Through the discourse analysis, we investigate how the medicine, the church and the states seeked to strengthen their power during the period of the construction of the cemeteries. As the medicine brings to bear illnesses (yellow fever and cholera) to ground their knowledge, it was also strengthening the state’s power; on the other hand, the church tried to show itself open in order not to lose its power over the deads.