Charting Disease and Documenting Backwardness in Rural Brazil

The convergence of nationalist concerns with new scientific discoveries, sent the Oswaldo Cruz Institute on a series of scientific missions into the Brazilian interior in the early 20th century. Sanitation experts Dr. Arthur Neiva and Dr. Belisário Penna led the most famous of these expeditions in 1913 traversing much of the rural Northeast and documenting social, economic, and particularly disease conditions.  The physicians’ alarming results suggested that the average sertanejo (rural native) was shockingly ignorant and primitive, lacking any identification with the Brazilian nation and riddled with disease.   Their report is well-known among historians of the Brazilian sanitation and hygiene campaigns of the early 20th century that resulted from the civilizing aspirations and interventionist policies of the first Republican government.  The large body of visual materials collected during the scientific conquest of the backlands provides a rich and largely unanalyzed window into Brazil’s “vast hospital.” The photographic record of this journey offers a striking visualization of rural life in the early century, however, of equal significance is the coastal scientific construction of backwardness, desperation, and difference.  Reading this photographic evidence reveals the scientists’ interpretation of color, ethnicity, gender, disease, and deformity in the Brazilian sertão.  The visual composition of the images suggests that the scientists saw disease as a routine element of rural life, naturalized into the Brazilian environment.  The proposed paper will offer a cultural analysis of this medical vision of rural backwardness as an authentic yet deplorable representation of Brazilianness.