Disease and Labor in the Brazilian State: A Socio-Political Approach to Public Health, 1833-1882

Abstract

The development of Brazilian public health in the nineteenth century provides a fresh perspective on Brazilian state building. This dissertation examines the role of public engagement in the evolving nature of state policies of health protection, and their consequences, throughout the decades. Public engagement demonstrated that health politics were made of the negotiations among varied social actors (state officials and the population, including the enslaved). Such negotiations generated opportunities to better understand how the state made sense of the development of public health and sheds a new light into the making of state institutions and political legitimacy. I ultimately demonstrate that public engagement in the development of public health was a critical aspect of Brazil’s nineteenth-century process of state making.