Editor's note

EDITOR'S NOTE

Dear Readers,

As you have probably noticed, the cover of this issue features images from the Vaccine Rebellion, which this November marks its 100th anniversary. We chose these illustrations because we are proud to publish this issue in parallel with the centennial commemorations organized by two of Fiocruz's divisions: Casa de Oswaldo Cruz and Bio-Manguinhos (Instituto de Tecnologia em Imunobiológicos).

It's definitely worth a trip to the Centro Cultural Correios to check out the opening exhibit, which runs through 16 January 2005. Included will be videos, movies, plays, a seminar, and publications of works on the immunization policies enacted in Brazil during the course of the last century. The organizers are also considering creation of a virtual exhibit accessible over the internet, along with the compilation of a data bank of sources on the history of vaccines and immunization campaigns.

In a way, we helped foster these events through our last year's publication of a special issue entitled "Immunization in Brazil: History and Perspectives" (vol.10, suppl. 2, 2003). In historiographical terms, the popular uprising that took place in Rio de Janeiro in November 1904, at the height of urban remodeling and sanitation works, still stands as the most eloquent emblem of the relations between State and society under the Old Republic. The current centennial activities afford us a wonderful opportunity to rethink the complex factors that engendered this movement, most especially the relations between the smallpox vaccine and other biological preparations used in the public health field for immunization back then, the scientific actors and knowledge that gave body to this Pasteurian technology (even Jenner's, then modernized), and the problems traceable to a fragile citizenry and to the new ways of organizing urban space and social control.

This issue will in fact be reaching you as these events intersect with another event, of equal importance: On the one hand, we have the opening of an exhibit on the rebellion of sectors of Rio de Janeiro's population against mandatory vaccination — with a shot that was to rid the world of smallpox within seventy years. On the other hand, the 9^th Congress of the Brazilian Society of the History of Medicine is drawing to a close. This year it was held at the National Academy of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro, with the support of Casa de Oswaldo Cruz and the participation of a substantial number of researchers interested in the history of health and of the life sciences.

I can't help but think about the shifts that have taken place from those first Meetings of History and Health, sponsored by Casa de Oswaldo Cruz following its 1986 creation, up through this promising convergence between historians of medicine — trained in great numbers at Fiocruz, the Universidade de Campinas (Unicamp), and other centers of graduate studies—and physicians who have devoted themselves to writing the history of their own profession. They are the protagonists of a much older tradition, which grew out of medical curricula in the nineteenth century to become a form of erudition and/or of autonomous historiography, gaining institutionalized form in Brazil as of the 1940s.

This issue of História, Ciências, Saúde — Manguinhos was designed with the 9^th Congress in mind. In its pages, our contributors explore various angles of the history of medicine and of public health. At this particularly fertile moment, this is our contribution to a field we have helped cultivate since the journal's creation ten years ago, with the invaluable collaboration of you, our readers. We wish you a rewarding journey through the pages you are about to turn.

Jaime Larry Benchimol

Editor

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 Jan 2007
• Date of issue
  Dec 2004