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The Medicalization of Nordestinos: Public Health and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil, 1889-1930*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Stanley S. Blake
Stanley S. Blake*
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
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Extract

In his 1927 annual report to the Pernambucan state legislature, Governor Estacio de Albuquerque Coimbra wrote that “the economic, intellectual, moral and civic value of the Nation and the State is shaped, with the expression of human activity, in the excellence of physical and moral robustness of its population.” He believed that government was responsible for improving the condition of its citizens, and that “man, healthy or sick, … ought to fall under the knowing gaze of the Governments, preserving or restoring him to health, to benefit the Nation.” Under Coimbra's administrations, the Pernambucan government inaugurated public health, public assistance, and education programs designed to improve the material and physical well-being of Pernambucan citizens. This was not an easy task; regional economic underdevelopment and perennial budget crises threatened government-sponsored social programs. While public health programs could be implemented and administered with relative ease in the state's capital of Recife, transportation problems and low population density made the extension of such services to the residents of the state's interior almost impossible. Despite these obstacles, public health programs and the physical well-being of the state's populations had become the single most important concern of the Pernambucan government by the mid 1920s, and the expectation of future economic development and social progress was tied to the development of effective public health programs.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , October 2003 , pp. 217 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2003

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Latin American Studies Association meeting held in Miami in March 2000. I would like to thank David Sowell, Heather McCrea, Daisy Delogu and the anonymous TAM reviewer for their suggestions and comments.

References

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104 Pernambucan reformers followed the lead of industrialists in São Paulo and abroad who sought to modernize their workers through training programs and rationalization of the workplace. See Weinstein, Barbara, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar

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