EDITOR'S NOTE

Among the articles that inaugurate this first issue of História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos for 2013, we are pleased to offer our readers the dossier Brazil-Germany: medical and scientific relations. These articles are the product of a symposium held at the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz) in March 2011 as part of the commemorations of the Brazilian-German Year of Science, Technology, and Innovation, which ran from April 2010 to April 2011. The symposium was organized by Fiocruz's Casa de Oswaldo Cruz and Hamburg's Bernhard-Nocht Institut für Tropenmedizin, with the support of Fiocruz's Instituto de Comunicação e Informação Científica e Tecnológica em Saúde and its Vice-presidência de Pesquisa e Laboratórios de Referência da Fiocruz. The dossier is a collection of articles presented on that occasion by biologists and social scientists, as well as some graduate students. Approaching from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, the papers analyze the networks of actors and institutions that have participated in scientific and cultural exchange between our two countries and also reflect on the impact this exchange has had on political, diplomatic, and economic relations, which encompasses the circulation of ideas, scientists, institutional models, research agendas, medical products and technologies, and so on.

One set of these texts addresses the role played by scientific journals and newspapers in medical and scientific relations between Germany, Latin America, and Africa: the historian Stefan Wulf shows how the periodical Revista Médica de Hamburgo served as an instrument of German cultural policy between the two world wars; Marlom Silva Rolim and Magali Romero Sá investigate the interfaces between intellectual exchange and the pharmaceutical industry, as exemplified in two medical-pharmaceutical publications by Bayer; and Sílvio Marcus de Souza Correa analyzes what the German colonial press meant for German communities abroad, as a major vehicle in the dissemination of information on the tropical diseases that afflicted German settlers in Africa.

In the remaining articles of the dossier, the historian Karen Macknow Lisboa presents the topic of unhealthiness, acclimatization, and disease in Brazil as depicted in the writings of German-speaking travelers involved with the immigration question. René E. Gertz explores the contributions of German immigrant physicians who settled in Rio Grande do Sul between the Proclamation of the Republic and World War II and describes the conflicts that stemmed from their presence. André Felipe Cândido da Silva observes Brazilian-German relations as reflected in the career of physician Henrique da Rocha Lima, an important staff member at both the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz and Hamburg's Institut für Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten. Cristiana Facchinetti and Pedro Felipe Neves de Muñoz discuss how Juliano Moreira and other Brazilian psychiatrists absorbed the theories and practices of Emil Kraepelin from 1903 to 1933. Robert Wegner and Vanderlei Sebastião de Souza focus on Brazilian physicians' ties to 'negative' eugenics and highlight the conflicting roles played by the eugenicist Renato Kehl and the Brazilian Catholic Church. Juliana Manzoni Cavalcanti studies the trajectory of the Viennese physician Rudolf Kraus in South America from 1913 to 1923, when he devoted himself to the search for new biological therapies for infectious diseases in tropical regions.

In our Images department, Vera Lucia Cortes Abrantes explores the representation of female labor during the 1950s and 1960s as portrayed in the photographic work of Tibor Jablonszky. In Research Notes, Patrícia M. Aranha examines the topographical survey works undertaken by military engineers with the Rondon Commission, while Ana Laura Godinho Lima looks at recommendations about the 'problem child' made by Brazilian doctors in mental hygiene handbooks written from 1937 to 1947.

We hope you enjoy this latest issue!

Magali Romero Sá

Researcher at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz

Jaime L. Benchimol

Scientific editor

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  02 Apr 2013
• Date of issue
  Mar 2013