Plant breeding has been a human practice for some thousands of years. However, this process of domestication has made plants more vulnerable to pests and diseases. Classic plant breeding has allowed the genetic manipulation of plants through crossings with a resulting increase in crop productivity. Recently, the recombinant DNA technology has increased the possibilities of integration of exogenous genes to the plant genome, resulting in the production of transgenic plants. Despite the great debate on this issue, such plants represent to date a promising avenue for plant breeding. There are many examples of gene transference strategies which have been successful in promoting resistance to herbicides, viruses, fungi, bacteria and insects, or in producing an increase in food quality. In addition to biotechnological applications, transgenic plants have made a significant contribution to the study of gene functioning, such as the analysis of genic expression regulation and the study of protein functions codified by distinct plant genes.
Based on conceptions forged in classic Greece, the article affirms the idea of technology as a "way of doing" that is underpinned by forms of organization produced by the society where the technology has emerged and by the knowledge produced in each era. Emphasizing aspects of specific moments in Western history, it goes on to identify relations between technology and science--understood here as the search for maximum rationality. The article questions certain positions which would seem to contend that techno-science contributes to the production of social inequalities and injustice, given a kind of collusion between knowledge and power. In the case of medicine, it is held that modern science has paved the way for ever more efficacious technology for intervention that benefits humankind; furthermore, the failure to solve all of humanity's problems derives much more from the political character of these inequalities than from any specific role that science and technology could play in achieving such a solution.
The article analyzes reports from two scientific journeys into the Amazon conducted by the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, in 1910 and 1913, under the leadership of Oswaldo Cruz and Carlos Chagas, respectively. These reports contributed to the construction of representations and images of the region. Field observations not only provided data for the study and control of tropical diseases but also had a hand in the movement to denounce the serious sanitation conditions under which rubber workers labored. Journeys through the Amazon valley put the scientists in direct contact with the environment and with sick populations; these travels also made them face the huge challenges of learning about malaria and trying to control it. Analyses of these reports are part of studies on 'portraits of Brazil', which raise issues within the history of public health policies. In this endeavor to reveal the process by which scientific records are constructed, we worked with primary sources,from manuscripts to official texts.
This introductory text analyzes Regimento proveitoso contra a pestilência, written in Portugal around 1496. The work is situated within the context of the era's main theories and of medieval medical thought, based on the Arab tradition.
As a contribution to reflections on the art of curing during the colonial period, the article analyzes the proposal to hold surgical classes in the captaincy of Mato Grosso. This proposal was part of a set of measures taken during the period, measures that reflected the government authorities' concern with the public health.
The article investigates the impact of Western Christian concepts of disease and death on indigenous Guarani sensibility and their translation into social representations and practices in the Jesuit-Guarani missions of Paraguay's Jesuit Province during the seventeenth century. This research is based on a re-reading of the Cartas Anuas da Província Jesuítica do Paraguai, which encompass the 1609-75 period. The study seeks to ascertain how expressions of Guarani sensibility were appropriated by Jesuit discourse as part of the process of conversion to Christianity. It also accesses observable changes in Guarani sensibility as a result of this new mission reality.
The present article analyzes the letters exchanged by Caspar Hofmann and William Harvey in 1636 and the delineation of the main questions and answers on the blood circulation theory. The first part of the article presents concepts about blood circulation according to the time's physiology; the second part presents the changes introduced by Harvey; the third and last part presents the debate between Hofmann and Harvey.
The text analyzes
the extent to which smallpox and measles epidemics provoked transformations
in the ways in which workforces were acquired and used in colonial Amazonia
from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century, with an increase in slave
raids on the indigenous population and the attempt to organize a trade route
in African slaves to the region. It also explores how indigenous mortality rates
at the end of the seventeenth century led to a concern with the region's defence
and prompted the recruitment of soldiers from the Madeira islands.
The article analyzes
a 1790 manuscript copy of Materia medica misionera, a book written in
1710 by a Jesuit, Pedro Montenegro. Alongside knowledge of a magical or religious
nature, and exotic ingredients for the recipes, this work also contains the
unmistakable presence of Hippocratic and Galenic conceptions and a growing empiricism,
characteristic of the scientific transformations seen in the eighteenth century.
The analysis of this work also prompts reflections about the diffusion, circulation
and production of pharmacological and medical knowledge in the first half of
the eighteenth century within the missions and colleges installed in the area
that was the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, southern America.
The article explores
the botanical contributions of Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix's
book Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France
vis-à-vis the contributions of previous researchers, his use of iconographic
and discursive representations and its relevance to the project of French colonization.
It investigates why he refused Linnaeus' taxonomic model and what he intended
with his catalogue of botanical curiosities. The unfolding of his philosophical
and religious trajectory allows to understand his stance regarding the classification
of nature, the meanings of ethnological information, his forms of intellectual
appropriation, and his use of discourse and botanical iconography as political
and emotional propaganda to encourage colonial settlement.
This study describes three collections of texts published in the years following the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon. Housed at archives and libraries in Portugal, the texts represent a variety of literary genres and strategies of argumentation. Here they have been analyzed according to pre-established categories. They were written during a time of transition characterized by ideological hesitations and by an eclecticism of conservative bent, a time when the latest experimentalist currents coexisted alongside attempts to reconcile scholastic Aristotelianism and experimentalism. The study focuses on a narrower set of texts, of special interest to the history of science; these can be classified into one of two topics: (i) physical explanations for the earth tremors and (ii) hygienist concerns about this type of natural disaster.
José Pinto de Azeredo, of Rio de Janeiro, studied medicine and conducted notable experimental research in Edinburgh (1786-88), presenting his graduate thesis on gout in Leiden. Already appointed surgeon-general of Angola, he returned to Rio in 1789 and practiced medicine in Brazil. In 1790 he moved to Luanda, where he practiced at the Hospital Real and founded a medical school that did not survive his departure for Portugal in 1797. He worked at Lisbon's main military hospital and as a private physician until his death. His written works (some ten manuscripts and five publications) warrant an examination from the perspective of the history of medicine. In an article published in 1790 on Rio de Janeiro's air quality, he reveals the skills of an analytical chemist, his interest in the effects of different air components on organisms, and his concern with air quality in Brazil and Europe.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the environmentalist paradigm dominated medical debate. In Brazil, it engendered the construction of a hygienist agenda that framed physicians' work and provided an interpretive key to public health-related issues The article addresses these and other questions from teh perspective of a text by Portuguese physician Antonio Correa de Lacerda who resided in Belém (Pará) and São Luís (Maranhão) between 1818 and 1852. Entitled "Cholera-morbus," the manuscript was written in 1832, the year the epidemic hit Paris. Lacerda calls on different areas of knowledge in his presentation of a coherent explanation of the disease, affording us a view of an anticontagionist interpretation grounded in anatomopathological practice. He likewise demonstrates how it was possible for a provincial doctor to produce original knowledge on the relation between climate, health, and culture, including the medicinal use of Amazon plants.
In the eighteenth century, the Portuguese imperial model yielded to other international strategies, organized according to a logic of networks that revolved around centers for the production of knowledge and the creation and redistribution of scientific products. Within this context, Portugal underwent a 'conversion' that drew it towards the French and British colonial systems. A self-legitimized scientific field was one of the corollaries of the European Enlightenment, a process that involved at least two generations of men of science and, most importantly, whose success relied on the engagement of the State. This process did not transpire systemactically in Brazil, although many of the country's men of science were well abreast of the Enlightenment's most modern philosophical and scientific theories. Policies to foster scientific activities in Brazil did not occur in tandem with broad, deep transformations in the spheres of administration, sociability, institutions, economics, or culture.
Manuel Ferreira da Câmara became known in historiography for his political profile as a statesman and parliamentarian. His historical trajectory shows a link between these political interests and his studies in the natural sciences. This article is the result of research on the scholar's scientific memoirs, with an analysis that focuses on the broader social context in which they were conceived. These memoirs stand as valuable testimony to the existence of scientific production under the Portuguese Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and illustrate the richness of thinking under the Luso-American Enlightenment.
Manuel Ferreira da Câmara was one of the exponents of Luso-american Enlightenment. The historiography has highlighted his activities as an administrator, employee and politician, neglecting to incorporate his dimension as a naturalist. By resurrecting this facet of a student of the natural world, we find in the archives and libraries various texts by the author that remain unpublished. One of these manuscripts is entitled "A note on extraction from the mines of the Principality of Transylvania written in Zalathna on March 5, 1796", produced during a trip through several countries of Central and Northern Europe at the request of the Portuguese government. Given the reflection elaborated by Câmara on the Transylvania region and the policy of administering the mines implemented there, its publication is highly relevant.
Carlos Ribeiro, one of the directors of the Geological Commission of Portugal, voyaged in 1858 to many countries of Europe to acquire publications, equipment and comparator collections. In Paris he met Paul Deshayes, a well-known conchologist, who gave him access to his personal collections of Tertiary deposits from France and helped him to classify Portuguese fossils. The outcome of the joint work can be seen in the Ribeiro List, which is preserved in the historic archives of the National Energy and Geology Laboratory (Alfragide, Portugal). These classifications served as a basis for a monograph published by Pereira da Costa, Ribeiro's colleague on the Geological Commission, and the definition of the stratigraphy of Portugal's Tertiary deposits.
The article analyzes the role of healing agents played by practitioners of magic and witchcraft in Mato Grosso society during the 17th century. It observes that magic and witchcraft were developed as competitors, alternatives or associated with other forms of healing (official and lay). It points out how such roles contributed to the process of subjugating its practitioners, especially Africans, Indians and their descendents, and were appropriated as an opportunity for survival in the colonial slave society. The pastoral visit made by Bruno Pinna in 1785 to Cuiabá and nearby areas served as the principal source of knowledge regarding the practices and practitioners of magic and witchcraft.
Informa sobre a realizacao de um mapeamento dos acervos arquivisticos e bibliograficos pertinentes a historia do ensino medico no periodo de 1808 a 1907, existentes em instituicoes na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, reunidos de forma sistematizada, de modo a fornecer informacoes referenciais basicas sobre a localizacao dos acervos, seus conteudos, as condicoes de acesso e de utilizacao.(MAM)
The article presents a panorama of documented sources and of the most representative archives, libraries, and documentation centers pertinent to the history of health sciences in Brazil (1808-1930). Historians, especially those investigating the biomedical sciences, will find here a broad and diversified set of sources. It is precisely from such a convergence of different witnesses that historical investigation is viable.
Based on documentation from the institution known as Fisicatura-mor (1808-28), and mainly on proceedings involving its official 'accreditation' of medical activities, this analysis of popular therapists opens access to categories like bleeders and healers, who were persecuted for their activities down through the nineteenth century. The curing practices employed by these bleeders and curandeiros ranked low on the hierarchy of procedures acceptable by the Fisicatura-mor. Quantitative data analysis demonstrates a link between these practices and disadvantaged social positions. Also analyzed was information that popular therapists and their clientele provided on these practices and on how they are accepted.
The article recounts the process of regulating the health professions in England from 1815 to 1858. Impelled by the period's epidemics, this was also the time of the sanitary reform, in which health professionals devoted themselves to aiding the ill. Since the technical attributions of each type of professional were not clearly defined, this field of un-regulated practices became divided into two areas: the provision of medical advice and the manipulation of formulas. Three important measures changed the field of medical and pharmacological practices: the Apothecaries Act (1815), the Pharmacy Act (1852), and the Medical Act (1858). These laws were a mixed reflection of the interests of the State, medical professionals, and British society.
This article traces the travels of the Scottish physician Archibald Smith through the Peruvian Andes between the 1820s and 1860s. Despite his prominent role in the nineteenth-century Peruvian medical scene, almost nothing has been written on Archibald Smith. By exploring Smith's medical activities, publications, and debates, this article intends to uncover unexplored areas of Peruvian medical history, such as the animosity between local and foreign physicians during the post-Independence war era and the important role played by medical geography as a scientific discipline for redefining ethnical and regional issues.
This analysis of Brazil's first medical newspapers - Propagador das Ciências Médicas (1827-28); Semanário de Saúde Pública (1831-33); Diário de Saúde (1835-36); Revista Médica Fluminense (1835-41); Revista Médica Brasileira (1841-43) - shows how Rio de Janeiro's socio-cultural context made it possible for this type of publication to emerge within the city's dynamic, troubled environment of the 1820s and 30s. I argue that the distinguishing feature of Brazil's early medical journalism was a symbiosis between business (local publishing houses' commercial interests), politics (struggles for political hegemony during the consolidation of the Imperial State), and science (the movement to institutionalize medicine and affirm it as a science).
In this contribution to the debate on the institutionalization of medicine in Brazil, special focus is placed on the role that the first Brazilian medical periodicals played in endeavoring to establish and broaden the medical audience. The success of these efforts meant that physicians belonging to Rio de Janeiro's Sociedade de Medicina and, later, to the Academia Imperial de Medicina needed to make scientific periodicals an effective means of exchange among members of Rio de Janeiro's cultured elite. The attention devoted by these periodicals to the nation's sanitary issues underscores the importance of the hygienist discourse, viewed as the prime way to bring medicine into public life.
Na década de 1830, os navios da Marinha Real britânica tinham a missão de
realizar mapeamentos precisos de costas e portos, contatar governos locais e
estabelecer relações comerciais e diplomáticas. Ao voltar à Inglaterra, homens
como Robert FitzRoy, comandante do His Majesty’s Ship (HMS) Beagle, publicaram
relatos de suas expedições. Descreveram e analisaram as sociedades visitadas,
comparando-as com a atuação britânica no globo. No Brasil, entusiasmaram-se com
as paisagens tropicais e criticaram seus habitantes, tidos como ineficientes na
exploração econômica e socialmente atrasados. Naqueles anos, a ciência
acompanhou a expansão imperial britânica, e os relatos dos comandantes
legitimaram discursos sobre suas práticas de dominação.
Chile began creating a scientific academy in the late nineteenth century. Coming under the umbrella of the state, it shared governmental perspectives and objectives. The state asked science to help augment the country's economic production and social development by modernizing traditional forms of work from the top down. In our article we focus on the relation between science and fishing, examining the vision of scientists and their conflict-ridden dealings with traditional fishermen. This was not a fruitful relationship, and it ended with scientists requesting the delegitimization of fishermen as producers, receivers and encoders of knowledge.
This analysis of the contributions of Manoel da Gama Lobo (physician born in Pará), to the epidemiology of vitamin A deficiency in Brazil focuses primarily on "Da oftalmia brasiliana" [On Brazilian ophthalmia], originally published in 1865. An analysis of Gama Lobo's academic trajectory, and especially of this work, points up the tight ties between the scientist and doctors within the Escola de Medicina Tropicalista Baiana. Although one cannot claim that Gama Lobo was a proponent of the ideas of the abolitionist movement, some passages of "Da oftalmia brasiliana" lead us to recognize this scientist at the very least as an advocate of Brazilian slaves' human right to food.
The formation and
study of natural history and paleontology collections was part of the installation
of political order under the Empire of Brazil, as well as the establishment
of a scientific program. The symbiosis between science and the nation was actively
promoted by Peter W. Lund, pioneer of paleontology studies in the country. The
collections and writings produced by the naturalist lent support to the visualization
of the past and the writing of history in Brazilian and European scientific
and cultural institutions and museums. The disputes over the political order
under the Regencies and the Majority were closely accompanied by the study and
explanation of the forms of life and the planet found in the past.
An inventory of the theses on hepatitis of the Faculdade de Medicina of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro between 1837 and 2000 is presented. The analysis indicates the potential and limits for discussion of the evolutionary framework of scientific knowledge on these health problems in Brazil. The theories are also discussed in light of their scientific reference points and the technological and social changes that influenced them. The landmarks in medical education and knowledge about hepatitis are identified and categorized, considering that the theses reveal at the very least the state of the art on the subject. The study makes it possible to explore the foundations upon which the scientific knowledge on hepatitis were built and indicate possibilities for research in the reconstruction of scientific knowledge of other health problems.
This article analyzes the main objectives of the scientific voyage to circumnavigate the earth, undertaken by the United States from 1838 to 1842. Charting was one of the most important of the scientific and strategic goals of the exploratory voyage. The initiative for the undertaking was the search for exact positioning on the high seas after the establishment of the longitude system, when nautical charts and maps from various countries were compared, and other, new ones were drawn. The United States participated in this international effort, leading to the creation of its own cartographic system.
During the Second Reign, the regulation and inspection of food trade in the city of Rio de Janeiro were characterized by heated clashes between three agencies that had overlapping powers in the matter: the Câmara Municipal (Municipal Chambers), the Secretaria de Polícia (Police Department), and the Junta Central de Higiene Pública (Central Public Hygiene Board). The article analyzes the conflicts between these agencies, while taking into account their coincidental duties and power disputes and also underscoring the Chamber's effort to preserve its former public health responsibilities, essential to protecting its governmental capacities.
During the summer of 1849-50, a yellow fever epidemic hit the city of Rio de Janeeiro. In analyzing the epidemic's impact on local funeral customs, the article asked to what extent the subsequent high mortality rate was a catalyst that changed people's attitudes towards death and the deceased. The central hypothesis is that the epidemic was the final argument physicians needed to convince the imperial government and the population to implement these doctors' project, one which would medicalize death and standardize funeral customs.
This paper covers some periods in Hermann von Ihering’s scientific trajectory: his
training in zoology in Germany and Naples, his international activities based in Brazil,
and his return to Germany. It deals with aspects of the formulation of his theories on
land bridges. It focuses on the network of contacts he maintained with German émigrés like
himself, and primarily with Florentino Ameghino, which allowed him to interact in
international scientific circles. It mentions excerpts of his letters and his publications
in the periods when he began corresponding with Ameghino (1890), when he travelled to
Europe in search of support for his theories (1907), and when he published his book on the
history of the Atlantic Ocean (1927).
The article explores the relation between the advance of transportation technology and the development of scientific expeditions between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Argentina. Expansion of the railway network on a national scale impacted the development of the earth sciences by facilitating access to distant places by scientific institutions located in Córdoba, Buenos Aires, and La Plata and also by simplifying the movement of equipment, scientific collections, and personnel. Hermann Burmeister's expedition (1857-60), expeditions by scientists from the Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Córdoba, and archeological digs in the northwestern provinces, organized by scientific institutions headquartered in Buenos Aires and La Plata, serve as examples.
This study offers a panoramic view of the relation between the development of naturalist studies and the control of territory in Peru from the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Notable scientific development took place during this period, in terms of research and of academic institutions. Both research and academe enjoyed the support of the State, which had greater resources within its reach following the period of relative instability subsequent to Independence in 1821. Although this process of development was fragmented and discontinuous, it resulted in the first mapmaking work and geographic and naturalist studies, as well as the creation of communication pathways. Further, it was justified by its potential contribution to an export economy and to the cultural prestige of civilian elites.
The article examines the state of health of a population of runaway slaves, based on announcements published in Rio de Janeiro's Jornal do Commercio in 1850. Two strategies were used. The first entailed analysis of the slaves' physical characteristics, as described by their masters. Taking into account the slave's health, the second step was to describe his or her physical problems as viewed by the era's medical or folk knowledge. This evidence can be traced to procedures found in the slave system, which sought to maximize use of captives.
The article examines science and technology communication aimed at a non-specialized audience, using the general press as the main source in this endeavor to capture an image of the popularization of science in Portugal. Based on the fact that the nineteenth-century press was overtly concerned with garnering an audience and spreading knowledge, the study uses news, articles, and advertisements about the 1853-1856 cholera epidemic to assess the era's scientific knowledge (especially about prevention and treatment) and how this information was conveyed to society and used by it.
During the 1991 cholera epidemic in the state of Pará, there were a substantial number of victims. Although those stricken recovered quickly, they were reluctant to leave the hospital. Taking proportions into account, nineteenth-century living conditions were similar to the living conditions confronted by the sick receiving care at the Hospital Universitário João de Barros Barreto (HUJBB). In the twentieth century, apparently the illness was still attached to old structures and conjured up worries that are now unnecessary, since today's treatment is fast-working and effective. Stories of days past quickly surfaced, with terrifying images of the 1855 cholera epidemic. In addition to relying on documental sources, the study analyzed the memories of cholera patients, their relatives, and other actors. Findings allow for a comparison between the epidemics of yesterday and of today, in turn permitting the prediction that such tragedies will be repeated because the living conditions of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century poor remain the same.
In this article, I explore the theoretical, social and ideological bases of the emergence and consolidation of the Colombian medical notion of the 'Magdalena fevers'. Firstly I show how, in the late 1850s, the emerging Colombian body of medical doctors elaborated peculiar notions on fevers by articulating the European medical theories (i.e. the miasmatic theory and the climatic determination of diseases) with the negative valuation of the hot climate. Secondly, I explain how free trade policies in the mid-1800s, and the economic and ideological impacts of the agricultural export of tobacco and indigo determined doctors' interest in the epidemics occurring in the production centers and also, therefore, the emergence of the notion of 'Magdalena fevers'. I also show how doctors established a causal association between the productive process of those goods and the fevers.
This article explores the position of mental health authorities in the civil justice field by studying psychiatric evaluations in cases of judicial interdiction on account of dementia in Santiago de Chile in the mid nineteenth century. It examines the legal framework that created a space for the figure of the expert and focuses on the everyday use of psychiatric evaluations, in order to explore some of the forces which legitimized their authority in the changing conditions of early psychiatry.
The Imperial Instituto Fluminense de Cultura (Fluminense Imperial Institute of Agriculture) encouraged debate with a view to eradicating the blight that devastated sugar cane plantations in the State of Bahia. Rural landowners, government officials and men of science participated in the discussions. The article presents the context of the sciences applied to agriculture, especially agricultural chemistry and the repercussions of the 'discoveries' of Justus Liebig in Brazil. The debate at the Imperial Instituto about the sugar cane blight was analyzed, together with the ideas espoused there and the characters involved in the issue. The procedures and solutions presented are studied, as well as the formation of knowledge networks around the agricultural sciences, which was in the process of institutionalization at the time.
This study on prisoners' diseases and food conditions in the early days of operation of the Casa de Prisão com Trabalho (labor penitentiary) in Salvador, Bahia, analyzes prisoner strategies for obtaining medical treatment and decent food. In their resistance and struggle to achieve more breathing room within the new prison model, which authorities hoped to implement at Bahia's first penitentiary, prisoners themselves took advantage of the new official norms. Even when deprived of such basic necessities as health and food, prisoners were not passive victims of the new prison system but instead engaged actively in the construction of their own history.
This article introduces a person who is little known and studied in the Brazilian and South-American academic communities. Frances Power Cobbe was a British woman in the Victorial period engaged in various social causes, among them the abolition of vivisection. In her later years, Cobbe criticized any use of live animals in laboratory experiments, with or without the use of anesthetics. Our initial focus is on the relationship between Cobbe and Charles Darwin and the conflict they both were involved in regarding the ethical legitimacy of using live animals in physiological experiments for the good (or not) of knowledge and mankind.
