[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[Adolpho Lutz: a biographical sketch].

This article portrays the family origins and life story of Adolpho Lutz (1855-1940) up to his transfer to the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz in 1908. His life history is used as a motif for an analysis of the institution of pasteurian and tropical medicine in Brazil. His university and postgraduate study in German-speaking Europe are examined, as are his activities as a clinician and researcher on subjects related to helminthology, parasitology, veterinary medicine and bacteriology in the interior of São Paulo state; his stay at the Molokai leprosarium in Hawaii; and the medical controversies in which he participated as head of the Bacteriological Institute of São Paulo, especially those on cholera, dysenteries, typhoid fever, malaria and yellow fever.