"Risk-free rest and sleep:" Jornal do Médico (Portugal) and the thalidomide disaster, 1960-1962.

This article analyzes the way the Porto-based journal Jornal do Médico reported on the thalidomide disaster. The pages of the publication are researched from the beginning of 1960 to the end of 1962 with the aim of identifying and discussing two interconnected questions: the delay in publishing news on the harmful effects of the drug, which was sold in the country under the brand name Softenon®, and the discursive construction of a lack of accountability on the part of physicians for the phenomenon of medication iatrogenesis.

Women from the Federation of Societies for the Care of Lepers and Defense Against Leprosy, 1926-1947.

This paper studies the family profiles of women holding key decision-making positions in the Federação das Sociedades de Assistência aos Lázaros e Defesa Contra a Lepra in different parts of Brazil. Using prosopography as a research method and technique, information was collated on women who were closely involved in Brazil's health policy concerning leprosy from the mid-1920s to the late 1940s. The research confirms the involvement of the women in the control and management of the country's preventoria and suggests that the social and professional standing of the fathers and/or husbands of the women who ran the federation was an element that influenced their actions towards the disease.

[For the sacrifice of isolation: leprosy and philanthropy in Argentina and Brazil, 1930-1946].

Patronato de Leprosos, in Argentina, and Federação das Sociedades de Assistência aos Lázaros e Defesa Contra a Lepra, in Brazil, were created as institutions designed to help people with leprosy and their families. Headed by women from the ruling classes, these entities took very similar actions, despite the different national contexts in which they operated, both supplementing leprosy healthcare policies in their respective countries. This article aims to demonstrate the similarities in the strategies adopted by both philanthropic institutions, which, in the 1930s and 1940s, acted in harmony with the physicians who supported compulsory isolation.

[Hansen's disease in Maranhão in the 1930s: on the way to Colônia do Bonfim].

Some aspects of Hansen's disease and the health policy for those having it in Maranhão in the 1930s are pointed out. The resolution of the disease in that state followed the precept imposed by the centralizing national health policies developed in the Vargas period: greater sanitary vigilance of those having the disease and the construction of a compulsory isolation colony for the contagiously ill largely characterized the decade regarding the prophylaxis of what was then called leprosy. The discourses of Achilles Lisboa, the doctor who best expressed this period, are highlighted here, since they contributed to aggressively mold the public policies of exclusion directed to those having Hansen's disease in Maranhão.