This issue of História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos contains some valuable articles on biomedicalization of Brazilian bodies, a social, medical and scientific process that has been carefully scrutinized by leading anthropologists. In their note, the guest editors clearly outline the nature of this special issue and the contributions of the articles that they have brought together. With the editors’ permission, we have added two important texts, previously approved for publication in the journal. The first, by Andreza Rodrigues Nakano, Claudia Bonan and Luiz Antônio Teixeira, examines the topics covered in a book that was fundamental to obstetrics and caesarean sections during the twentieth century from the provocative perspective of the Polish biologist and philosopher of science, Ludwik Fleck. The second is an interview with one of the leading historians of medicine in the United States, Charles Rosenberg. Thanks to Rafael Mantovani, we were given access to the intriguing ideas of this important researcher from Harvard University.
We would like to take the opportunity to announce in this note that, despite the dramatic funding cuts to our journal and to other academic journals in Brazil, we have managed to obtain significant financial support from foreign institutions. Besides the support of the British Academy, mentioned in another issue ofHistória, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, we have been awarded a grant by the Wellcome Trust in England. Thanks to the support of the British Academy, we will be running a workshop on the challenges facing interdisciplinary journals, in collaboration with the English Journal of Latin American Studies, on June 22, 23 and 24, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. The Wellcome grant will allow us to start commissioning historiographical review articles, which are fundamental nowadays both in order to get an overview of the principal topics studied in recent years and to help develop future historical studies on science, medicine and public health in Brazil and Latin America. The grant will also allow us to increase the number of articles appearing in English translation in our digital issues throughout 2016. Although we are aware that we do not yet have the financial resources to be a completely bilingual journal, and that translation is not synonymous with internationalization, our goal is to be relevant and pertinent both nationally and internationally; that is, we wish our articles to have an impact in Brazil, in Latin America and in the rest of the world. Therefore, we return to the problem we alluded to in the first sentence of this paragraph: the funding cuts affecting Brazilian journals and scientific research. Our position can be summed up as follows: we have not only the right but the need for scientific communities that can communicate with each other through peer-reviewed publications. We are among those who believe that poverty and social inequalities should not hinder science and history. In countries like Brazil, the main scientific lesson from history is that we need more science; we need more science so as not to make the same mistakes, so we can finally overcome material and cultural poverty, so we can aspire to a better future, so we can establish a sustainable, long-term system to create and recreate our economic, technological and intellectual wealth.
Marcos Cueto, science editor
André Felipe Cândido da Silva, science editor
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jan-Mar 2016
