Doctors, Nurses, and Mothers: The Brazilian State and Nursing Education during World War II

This paper investigates the Brazilian state’s professionalization of medical services and education during the Estado Novo, 1937-1945.  In this period the emerging welfare bureaucracy attempted to produce citizens through the construction of motherhood as a scientific enterprise.  An immense obstacle to the nation building project was the high rate of infant mortality and disease.  Women increasingly received state attention as an essential element in the nation building project and also as a source of infant mortality.  They were in need of moving from unhealthy to healthy status, therefore becoming “modern” and responsible parents.  The state focused on women who were poor, non-white and receiving treatment outside the scrutiny of government programs and the scope of western medicine.

A key component of state action was the standardization and centralization of nursing education, including the license and control of midwives.  Through the analysis of speeches, policies, decrees and programs created and implemented by Vargas, his federal ministers, important politicians and members of the medical community, this research uncovers the process in which the state sought, many times successfully, to regulate nursing and shift the attention of their work to the education and vigilance of poor women.  In addition, through the continued supervision of nurses the state also attempted to regulate midwives creating a cleavage between those who had been trained by the state and those who had not.  In this paper I will focus on the tension between the modernizing reforms of nursing education and the reality of maternal public health policy.