What’s Wrong Here? Discourses on Race, Health, and Nation in Mid-Twentieth-Century Puericulture Cartoons

This paper analyzes the content of a “Puericulture Supplement,” published by a group of doctors and officials from Brazil’s National Children’s Department roughly from 1948 to 1955. The discussion will focus on a comic strip entitled, “O quê está errado?" (What’s Wrong Here?) that portrayed children committing a variety of hygiene, behavioral, and social blunders.  I will explore how and why the comic specifically sought to discredit traditional and folk approaches to children’s health and rearing by advocating modern, scientific solutions.  I will draw attention to one recurring cartoon that depicted a white child telling a black child that his mother forbade him to play with “little black boys.” The provocation “What’s Wrong Here?” thus demonstrated how the medical academy conceptualized and attempted to mitigate at set of larger, generational public health and social concerns that they imagined to be hindrances to Brazil’s development as a nation.