The year 2020 will be evoked with pain, grief and consternation, but also with admiration for the brave physicians, scientists, health workers, artists and leaders of the urban peripheries who confronted covid-19 and the government. A criminal lack of planning, plus the scarcity of vaccines, has led to the death of a large number of the most vulnerable individuals in Brazil: Afro-Brazilians, the poor, those living in favelas, and members of Amazon communities (Ferrari, Januzzi, Guerra, 2020).
In this letter I would like to remind everyone that during every serious crisis – whether social, institutional or personal – we must attempt to look after our own mental health and ensure the tranquility of those who surround us, our friends and family. We do this by celebrating together something good that we did or that occurred, no matter how small when compared to the tragedy we are experiencing. So, I hope you can celebrate with me some of História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos’ achievements in volume 27, published in five issues throughout 2020. I believe it is a record that complements previous accounts of the journal, which was established in 1994 ( Benchimol et al., 2007BENCHIMOL, Jaime L. et al. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos: um balanço de 12 anos de circulação ininterrupta. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos , v.14, n.1, p.221-257, 2007. ; Cueto, Silva, 2019).
In 2020, we were able to keep to our regular schedule of four issues per year, plus a special issue entitled “The meaning(s) of global public health history,” which included a large number of authors from abroad. To commemorate the 120th anniversary of Fiocruz, we published the dossier “Moorish Pavilion: Singular and Universal,” organized by the researchers Inês El-Jaick Andrade, Renato da Gama-Rosa Costa and Sônia Aparecida Nogueira. In the Historiographical Review section, created in 2017, two articles were published that illustrated the importance of the section in attracting themes critical to the historiography of science. The first, by Ana Paula Vosne, “Women, male doctors, and female historians: a historiographic essay on the history of women, medicine, and gender,” was published in issue 1; and the second, by José Augusto Pádua and Alessandra Izabel de Carvalho, “The construction of a tropical country: a review of environmental historiography on Brazil,” appeared in issue 4. In April 2020, we launched a section called Coronavirus and History on the journal’s blog, with important texts from Brazilian and foreign historians invited to write about the pandemic in their countries, cities or states. Throughout 2021, extended versions of some of these texts will find their way into a new section of the journal called Covid-19 Testimonies, inaugurated in the first issue of this year. An important discussion took place during the second half of 2020 with the journal’s assistant editors and section editors regarding the new instructions for authors made available online in February 2021. Another significant activity was our participation in the activities of the Fiocruz Editors Forum, which has become a space in support of open science. It is important to highlight that, in 2020, 274 submissions from Brazil and another 17 countries were processed, principally, in terms of the number of submissions, from Argentina, Chile, the United States and Portugal. In late 2020, we established a fundamental goal for 2021: topublish a special edition entitled “Beyond the human: a history of our relationships with animals,” with invited editors Regina Horta Duarte, Natascha Stefania Carvalho De Ostos, Gabriel Lopes and Nelson Aprobato Filho.
Without a doubt, the pandemic led to greater visibility for the field of the history of healthcare, and there was a significant increase in the number of times the journal’s articles were accessed on the SciELO portal. In April 2020, the journal’s articles were accessed almost 380,000 times. The journal was accessed more than 3 million times in 2020 (compared to 1.5 million times in 2019). Last year, a total of 181 publications were posted on the Portuguese-language blog (www.facebook.com/RevistaHCSM), or an average of 15 per month. On the international version of the blog, 149 posts were published in English and Spanish. On our Twitter profile (twitter.com/revistaHCSM), which includes posts in three languages (Portuguese, Spanish and English), about 65 tweets were published per month.
With respect to our team, in 2020 we had to learn to work remotely, with all the challenges arising from this type of work. Covid-19 affected members of our team and their close relatives, with two family members dying. Personally, I am very grateful for the journal’s excellent team: Mônica Auler, Camilo Papi, Mônica Caminha, Vinícius Renaud, Marciel Mendonça, Miriam Junghans, Marina Lemle, Vivian Mannheimer, Fernando Vasconcelos, copyeditors and translators. I am also grateful to the members of the editorial team who helped us with valuable evaluations and guidance. And the advice, tips and optimism of Roberta Cerqueira, who is on leave for her PhD, have been very important.
Our journal’s achievements in 2020 were hard won given the uncertainties that hobbled academic periodicals during the year. Our persistence in the face of adversity can be explained in large part by our ties to a treasure of Brazilian and Latin-American culture: Fiocruz. We also wish to thank Paulo Roberto Elian dos Santos, director of Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, the Fiocruz unit in which we work, for his strong support of the journal. For us, who work at Fiocruz, there is an inexplicable feeling of belonging to a long tradition of creativity accustomed to overcoming adversity. It is more important than ever for us to remember this tradition now, when we are spending most of our time on the internet, in the midst of scientific denialism, lack of support for scientific research and political authoritarianism during a pandemic.
We are grateful to the authors and peer reviewers who have made an extraordinary effort. Their historical studies and peer reviews not only address fundamental issues, but also enrich our knowledge of a discipline that, as the Argentinean poet Jorge Luis Borges suggests, continues “ beyond the pomp and ashes of anniversaries.” In the articles, history shines with the necessary data, the order of the chronological report, the contrast between discourse and practice, the selection of the relevant long-term facts, the critical use of different information sources, and the researchers’ interpretation of the Babylonia of voices from the past. The articles indicate that history can be a source of inspiration in the face of a crushing reality.
Thus, I hope our 2021 articles make the minds and hearts of our readers vibrate and illuminate the courage which we now need.
REFERÊNCIAS
- BENCHIMOL, Jaime L. et al. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos: um balanço de 12 anos de circulação ininterrupta. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos , v.14, n.1, p.221-257, 2007.
- CUETO, Marcos; SILVA, André Felipe Cândido da. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos: 25+. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos , v.26, n.2, p.375-378, 2019.
- FERRARI, Ilka Franco; JANUZZI, Mônica Eulália da Silva; GUERRA, Andréa Máris Campos. Pandemia, necropolítica e o real do desamparo. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental , v.23, n.3, p.564-582, 2020.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
28 June 2021 -
Date of issue
Apr-Jun 2021
