Abstract
Written at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemics, in April 2020, the article recalls the innovative research by Oracy Nogueira that developed a sociological approach to the subject of illness. Voices from Campos do Jordão: social and psychic experiences of pulmonary tuberculosis in the State of São Paulo, re-edited by Fiocruz in 2009, results from his master’s thesis, defended in 1945 at the Free School of Sociology and Politics of São Paulo. Beyond the organic causes, Nogueira seeks the representations, meanings and stereotypes attributed to the disease that informed a segregating social conduct. From diagnosis to the desired cure, through the experience of isolation in a healing clinic, the study unveils the sociological and psychological dimensios of the disease. The concept of stigma, later coined by Erving Goffman to account for this type of social distance, insinuates itself in the approach proposed by Nogueira.
Keywords
Illness as a social experience; tuberculosis; Oracy Nogueira; segregation; Free School of Sociology and Politics