SANTOS, L. Q. B. F.; http://lattes.cnpq.br/3629397080079034; SANTOS, Leonardo Querino Barboza Freire dos.
Abstract:
In this thesis, we analyse the medical discourses about working classes which circulated in
Paraíba between 1930 and 1945. Thus, we seek to problematize the unfolding of the doctor’s
authorized speech about the social representations which were built around the worker’s
image. Despite the social laws in period, the salaried classes in Paraíba went on facing
difficult living conditions and high levels of work exploitation. Besides, the public health
network and the social security system remained far too distant from Paraiba’s proletariat
needs. Within this historical context, whether through the newspapers which circulated among
the great public, or through their Medical Society, their conferences and their specialized
journals, the doctors elaborated several discourses about the working classes’ health and
diseases. Many times overlooking the structural reasons for the “maladies” which afflicted
these groups, doctor’s from Paraíba represented them as a “sick organ”, which needed to be
“healed” to restore health to the “social body”. In this sense, they produced diagnostics and
proposed therapeutics with strong disciplinary content, searching to (con) form a “new
worker”, who would supposedly be healthy, orderly and productive. In order to discuss these
issues, we analysed mainly the daily newspapers which circulated through the state and
medical journals produced by doctors from Paraíba. In addition to these documents, we have
also based our work on laws and decrees about public health and sanctioned work
relationships during Vargas’ first government. In the analysis of this documental corpus, we
approach the theoretical references of Cultural History, especially as it refers to their
formulations about the historical and social dimension of the “representations”. In order to
problematize the relationships between the Brazilian State and the working classes during the
getulian period, we dialogued with the notions of labour developed by Ângela de Castro
Gomes, and “regulated citizenship” elaborated by Wanderley dos Santos. At last, based on the
concepts of “disciplinary power”, “discursive device” and “biopolitics”, formulated by Michel
Foucault, we discuss the participation of the medical knowledge in the social control politics
which sought (yet not always achieved) to “govern” workers from Paraíba in the decades of
1930 and 40.