Entre a farda e o jaleco: ciência médica, higiene e psiquiatria na produção intelectual do médico militar Murillo de Campos (1910-1936)

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the acts and the studies of the military doctor Murillo de Campos on health in the area of medical jurisprudence, military medicine, and psychiatry between 1910 and 1936. Murillo de Campos sought to construct a scientific discourse for the Brazilian nation in which the Brazilian people would not be the result of the degenerative miscegenation, but of their conditions and the environment where they lived. To explain his intellectual productions, the set of sources includes authorial works, excerpts from newspapers, ministerial reports, as well as publications in periodicals signed by either Murillo de Campos or by other contemporary scholars who have mentioned his productions. Initially, it was investigated how Murillo de Campos, at the begging of his acting as a doctor in the decade 1910s, thought a publication about the military hygiene, thought the role of the army and the military doctors. Afterward, it was analyzed the intellectual productions of Murillo de Campos regarding the trip he made to Amazonas, as a member of the CLTEMA – Comissão Construtora de Linhas Telegráficas Estratégicas do Mato Grosso ao Amazonas (Strategic Telegraph Commission of Mato Grosso to Amazonas). Based on the book “Interior do Brasil: Notas médicas e etnográficas” (1936), it was sought to understand how, through medicine and ethnography, Murillo de Campos had realized his role in the construction of a project in which the medical science had the function of presenting the bases for the solution to the national health-related problems. Finally, it analyzed the acts and the intellectual production of Murillo de Campos within the psychiatric field, seeking to comprehend how his characterological studies had interacted with his national projects debated in the public sphere during the years the decade of 1920s and 1930s. Therefore, this thesis supports that for Murillo de Campos the modernity and the progress of the nation would be linked to the transformation of the Brazilian people into national workers - the ones who work to give pride to their nation - and to that end, the characterological science was fundamental, thus it would allow knowing the “Brazilian”, provide diagnoses, and establish the several constitutional types and the hygienic means required for the development of a modern and healthy Brazilian nation. Therefore, the military doctor, the medical examiner and psychiatrist Murillo de Campos is perceived as intellectual as well as a social and political agent who was convinced of the role then given to the medical science. This paper is based on assumptions of intellectual history and references on the history of science in Brazil.