[Portraits of everyday activities at Manguinhos].

This text reconstructs everyday routines at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in the early twentieth century based on statements from staff at that time. As Antonil wrote in 1711, "Slaves are the hands and feet of the sugar-mill owner." The researchers' assistants fulfilled a similar role in the laboratories; their work ranged from unskilled tasks to extremely delicate scientific research that today requires specialized training.

Leishmaniases of the New World from a historical and global perspective, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

The first autochthonous cases of cutaneous and mucocutaneous leishmaniasis in the Americas were described in 1909, but visceral leishmaniasis only erupted as a public health problem in the region in 1934. Today Brazil is the country with the most cases of American tegumentary leishmaniasis, and alongside India has the highest incidence of visceral leishmaniasis. Knowledge production and efforts to control these diseases have mobilized health professionals, government agencies and institutions, international agencies, and rural and urban populations.

Zika and Aedes aegypti: new and old challenges.

Infection with the zika virus had a great impact not only on pregnant women and newborns, but also on public health, on popular ideas about Aedes aegypti and with respect to women's social rights. The objective of this paper is to identify this impact and the historical, social and health changes of the disease and the legacy of the zika virus. Interventions by researchers from different specialties foster conditions for more comprehensive investigations into future epidemic threats in Brazil and Latin America.

[The dissemination of scientific knowledge, social networks and historians creating new histories: an interview with Bruno Leal].

The interview with historian and journalist Bruno Leal deals with the creation of the Café História blog and the relationship between the internet, communications and the work of historians. His blog has become an important channel to promote historical material, with bibliographical references, helpful information about films, scientific events and videos related to this area. The interviewee stressed the importance of actions that combine communications with history, made criticisms of the current training given to historians and affirmed the need for curricular reform that enables new ways of producing and disseminating historical knowledge.

Malaria and quinine resistance: a medical and scientific issue between Brazil and Germany (1907-19).

This article addresses the discussion about quinine-resistant malaria plasmodium in the early decades of the twentieth century. Observed by Arthur Neiva in Rio de Janeiro in 1907, the biological and social resistance of malaria sufferers to preventive and curative treatment with quinine was corroborated three years later by Oswaldo Cruz during the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway in the Brazilian Amazon. Likewise in 1910, ailing German workers were transferred from Brazil to Hamburg's Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, where quinine resistance was confirmed by Bernard Nocht and Heinrich Werner.

[Medicine, science and power: relations between France, Germany and Brazil in the period 1919-1942].

This research note proposes hypotheses and frameworks for the study of the dynamics of the German and French medical and scientific movement aimed at Latin America, and Brazil in particular, between 1919 and 1942. It also seeks to comprehend to what extent the efforts at intellectual cooperation and the concomitant flow of ideas, institutional models, common research agendas, and action strategies aimed at expanding the Franco-Germanic field of influence in this part of the American continent, were put into practice.

[Railroads, disease, and tropical medicine in Brazil under the First Republic].

The article explores the impact of malaria on infrastructure works--above all, railroads--under the republican drive towards modernization. Railways helped tie the territory together and foster the symbolic and material expansion of the Brazilian nation. The scientists entrusted with vanquishing such epidemic outbreaks did not just conduct campaigns; they also undertook painstaking observations of aspects of the disease, including its relations to hosts and the environment, thus contributing to the production of new knowledge of malaria and to the institutionalization of a new field in Brazil, then taking root in Europe's colonies: "tropical medicine.

[Animals and the primitive: the others of our culture].

The essay offers an analytic overview of the concepts and representations of animals and the primitive within Greek-Latin culture from its beginnings through today. It examines longstanding notions and the disputes that these 'others' have stirred among thinkers in philosophy, anthropology, and other areas of knowledge.

[História, Ciências, Saúde--Manguinhos: examining 12 years of regular circulation].

The article analyzes the trajectory of História, Ciências, Saúde--Manguinhos since it was first released in 1994. This multidisciplinary journal opens its pages to unpublished, peer-reviewed articles, images, documents, interviews, and other material that address issues and important figures in the history of medicine, public health, and the life sciences. Approaching from the perspectives of health and of historiography, the article explores the context in which the journal was born and discusses the daily workings of a scientific editorial office.

[Danger is in the air: is the Spanish Flu back?].

When we were working on the present issue of our journal, where there are three special articles on the Spanish Flu, the epidemic that broke out in 1918 supposedly killing more people than the First World War, some news in the papers made our hair stand on end. "The world is heading to an influenza pan-epidemic", announced the World Health Organization last January 20 (O Globo, 2.01.

Fight for survival: the life of a Hansen's disease sufferer through his correspondence with Adolpho Lutz.

This project presents the complete set of letters between the family of a Hansen's disease (leprosy) sufferer in the state of Maranhão, in the Northeast of Brazil, and the doctor and bacteriologist Adolpho Lutz. For more than twenty years Fabricio Caldas de Oliveira and Numa Pires de Oliveira, father and son, exchanged a steady flow of letters with the scientist in pursuit of a cure for the disease that had assailed Numa since childhood. The 24 letters compiled here paint a unique portrait of the medical and social drama confronted by this family, and the results of the use of chaulmoogra oil and other medications in their search for alternative treatments.