A lesson in health reformism for the agrarian elite of Minas Gerais: Environment, race, and disease in Belisário Penna

Abstract

The topic of health reform has been explored historically by scholars of Brazilian Social Thought and, to a similar degree, in the History of Brazilian Science. These works focus above all on how the thinking of sanitary doctors was influential in shaping the structure of public health and scientific research in Brazil. On the other hand, the consolidation of the field of Environmental History in Brazil, in dialogue with relational fields such as ecocriticism, has made it possible to renew our reading of the classics of social thought. From this perspective, the main objective of this article is to analyze the role that the natural world plays in the conference Saneamento Rural and the booklet Minas e Rio Grande do Sul: estado da doença, estado da Saúde, both written by Belisário Penna and delivered or published in 1918. Methodologically, this article proposes a reading based on ecocriticism, understanding how Penna interprets the natural world from two opposing but complementary keys: in his narrative, the sanitary doctor exalts, on the one hand, the vastness and beauty of a natural world which, on the other hand, without sanitary intervention, produces sick human beings. Seeking to introduce sanitation as an ideal tool for the elite of Minas Gerais, and consequently Brazil through his comparative writing with Rio Grande do Sul, Penna argues that the people of Minas Gerais would be industrious and healthy if the environment in which they lived was reformed, sanitized. Changing the elements considered harmful from the natural world would therefore be a political task.