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.

Health as a battlefield: diseases and the healing arts in Brazil, 1750-1822.

This article explores how diseases were contemplated and faced in Portuguese America in the early 1820s, shortly before the consolidation of the political rupture with Portugal that made Brazil an independent country. It analyzes who the individuals called to treat the diseases of the suffering population were, along with their knowledge and their therapies. To achieve this, we must begin by taking a step back in time, emphasizing the influences of the reforms of the Portuguese Empire on medical knowledge in the second half of the eighteenth century.

From Independence to Empire: health and disease in Brazil in the nineteenth century.

As a presentation of the dossier "From Independence to Empire: health and disease in Brazil in the nineteenth century," the article contrast "modern Brazil" imagined by the medical and political elites on the occasion of the First Centenary of Independence in 1922 with the numerous problems and challenges in the field of health that the republic, in its third decade, had inherited from the colonial and Imperial periods. In addition, it highlights issues in the history of health in the 19th century that allow the readers of the dossier to reflect on the unfulfilled civilizational promises of 1822-1922 in light of the immense challenges of the year 2022 when Brazil completes two hundred years of political sovereignty.

The scorching tropics: fevers and public health in Brazil during the Joanine period, 1808-1821.

Although fevers (with the exception of yellow fever) have not yet been fully explored by the historiography of Brazilian health, they were almost inevitable in nineteenth-century Brazilian society, affecting huge portions of the population. Their victims suffered from a wide variety of symptoms, and identification and treatment of these symptoms were the object of intense debates in medical circles. The Luso-Brazilian intelligentsia considered European medical debates as well as their own clinical experiences and attempted to provide answers in a flurry of publications.