As leis higienistas do final do século XIX e a história da saúde pública em Belém

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the legal instruments of intervention that structured a new public health organization in Belém do Pará in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through sanitary and hygienic regulations that were used at the time of the approach. The hypothesis is that these two components of Civilization imposed not only a structural configuration of urban environments and beautification of spaces, as well as a new arrangement in the issue of public health. The motivation for this theme arose as a result of the public-private binomial regarding the health measures adopted in the face of infectious and contagious diseases, utilizing the historical framework of great transformation in the capital of the State of Pará in the Amazon Rubber Cycle. To do so, the methodology applied to this article, which involves both History and Law interdisciplinarily, is based on the hypothetico-deductive model, making use of bibliographical survey, analysis of documents, articles and periodicals on the subject. This research is divided into three chapters. The first chapter speaks of the history of global public health, from the industrial slums to the arrival of health issues in Belém do Grão Pará, due to the scourge of cholera. The theoretical framework used is Roberto Esposito's Community and Immunization Biopolitics, as well as hygiene and sanitation practices as paradigms of immunization. The second chapter presents a documentary analysis of the intendance reports from Antônio Lemos’ administration, between the years 1897 and 1908, under the immunization perspective. The third chapter discusses the results of hygienist policies during the governments of Paes de Carvalho and Augusto Montenegro, investigating the results of such policies using the decrees and laws on the subject. It is then concluded that such measures, in the light of historical events that occurred worldwide and locally, were necessary to preserve the lives of those who survived at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s in Belém do Pará.