The "reality of the knowledge and the ability instilled": climate, doctors, and public health in Brazil, 1808-1835.

This article analyzes the efforts to build spaces for the medical community in Brazil since the transfer of the Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, through the country's independence process, until the creation of the Imperial Academy of Medicine, in 1835. Such initiatives affirm the prominence of medical-scientific knowledge in the face of traditional healing practices, as well as a hygienic agenda for the independent nation, strongly linked to the legitimation of local expertise in Brazilian climatology. Throughout this process, some medical leaders involved sought to affirm the convergence between the hygienic discourse and the interests of the nascent imperial state, while at the same time announcing the renewal of the mechanisms of legitimation of the career that, supposedly, started to be given by scientific merit instead of the patronage system typical of the Ancien Régime.

The First Brazilian Thesis of Evolution: Haeckel's Recapitulation Theory and Its Relations with the Idea of Progress.

The aim of this work is to present the thesis "On the Ontogenetic Evolution of the Human Embryo in its Relations with Phylogenesis," by Affonso Regulo de Oliveira Fausto (1866-1930), published in Brazil in 1890. To our knowledge, it was one of the first Brazilian academic works focused specifically on evolution. It was also the first doctoral thesis that addressed the topic of recapitulation in order to analyze what was then called the progressive evolution of the human species in tandem with the embryological development of the individuals that would constitute the Brazilian "type.

[Clinical and experimental research in nineteenth-century Brazil: the circulation and control of knowledge in medical helminthology].

The contributions of Brazilian physicians to knowledge of diseases caused by parasitic worms, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had distinct effects on three epistemic communities: Brazilian clinical anatomy, French medical geography, and the emerging field of medical parasitology. Accepting the heterogeneity of both the systems for legitimizing scientific facts and the epistemological practices observed by each discipline, the text provides a specific cartography of the period's medical knowledge, revealing the lines of force shaping the three disciplinary fields. The focus on the circulation, control and validation of medical knowledge reveals strong controversies and complicated negotiations between different epistemic communities.

[Escola Tropicalista Baiana (Bahia Tropical School): the mystical origin of tropical medicine in Brazil].

This article aims at presenting the polemic current views on the genesis of tropical medicine in Brazil, by analyzing medical agents, concepts and procedures during the 18th century, which are generally understood as opposed to the institutionalization of this field of studies. It is our objective to revise the rigid boundaries between the pre-scientific and the scientific periods medical practice underwent during the Empire.