"Uma terrível moléstia que vem tomando proporções assustadoras" : uma história cultural do câncer na Paraíba (1908-1950).

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze the journalistic discourses in circulation in Paraíba about cancer in the first decades of the twentieth century. These are news that talk about the vertiginous growth of cases in men and women, generally over forty years of age. The periodicals tried to disseminate information about cancer control, which should be based on prevention, carried out based on health education in addition to investments made by state governments that had to make an effort to create diagnostic posts. I delimited as specific objectives, to understand the history of this disease in Paraíba from the discursive ways that the journals presented the disease to society, showing them the meanings and meanings of the disease, to problematize the medical knowledge contributed and put into circulation in the geography of Paraíba on the disease, which was still little known, and in general, deadly. This medical knowledge, possibly, generated speeches capable of guiding the population to read about the forms of prevention; and, finally, to discuss the performance of the doctor Napoleão Laureano, who dedicated his professional and political activities to the treatment of people at the time called “cancerous”. It is a disease that in its discursive order was presented with the nickname of tumor or cancer. When searching for the word cancer in the journals in circulation at the time, as in A União and d'O Norte, little could be found, growing considerably when the identifier migrated to metaphors that referred to “that disease”, or to “tumors ”. Thus, I already inform you that cancer was a disease discussed among doctors in Paraíba, providing a strong investment in it that culminated in the circulation of knowledge about a disease that gained attention and concern of doctors in Paraíba. Thus, we rely on Michel Foucault's (2009) concept of biopolitics, understood as a form of power responsible for defending life and warding off disease, regulating populations to make them healthy to discuss the topic at hand. In this case, biopolitics may be verified in the way of treating the disease as a possibility of defending life through the search for a cure for the ills of the body, we also use the concept of Disease as a Metaphor by Susan Sontag. Methodologically, we problematize through the analysis of the discourse along the lines of Michel Foucault (2014), the news from newspapers in circulation in Paraíba, in special, A União, O Norte and Revista de Medicina. It is concluded that since the early years of the twentieth century there was an investment in the circulation of information about a disease that gained attention and concern from doctors in Paraíba.