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OUR MAGAZINE COVER NOSSA CAPA

Cirurgião Negro Colocando Ventosas. Aquarela, 1826. Jean Baptiste Debret

Jean Baptiste Debret spent 15 years of his life in Brazil. He arrived here in 1816 as integrant artist of a French mission leaded by Joachim Lebreton, whose aim was creating the Imperial Fine Arts Academy of Rio de Janeiro.

During all his period in Brazilian lands, Debret’s relationship with the life of the Royal Family was always very close. He was the first artist to paint D. Pedro I, and portrayed important figures of the imperial life of the period, besides producing watercolors and pictures (some engraved in stone), which reproduce important happenings of early 19^th-century Brazilian History.

Jean Baptiste Debret always showed himself a painter very interested in the Brazilian social issues, registering them, however, without traces of ideology. He produced pictures about the court ceremonies and also about the everyday life in the city, with its black inhabitants (slaves or not), and the white masters. This is certainly one of the most enhanced aspects in the work of Debret, exposed in watercolors picturing slavework in the beginning of XIX Century and urban life with its habits, customs and traditions.

In the picture illustrating our cover, and opening a new series at JBPML, entitled Black Surgeon Applying Cups, Debret portrays a rather common scene in Rio de Janeiro in the 1800’s: in several districts, free black men worked as witch-doctors (shamans), here called by the painter African surgeons.

According to historians, the reduced number of physicians was one of the most expressive characteristics of areas where Portuguese America made itself strong and important. And this lacuna was naturally occupied by prayers and shamans, among others were included several free black people. For 26 years on XVIII Century just 14 students born in Brazil have studied Medicine, which have graduated in Montpellier, France.

In the watercolor we present, the black surgeon executes the bleeding. According to center-African religious traditions, human beings are constituted from four elements that, syntonized, made life possible. They were: the body and the blood, and this one was the fluid that carried the soul, and the double, that is, the shadow of the body and the spirit. For Africans, if infirmities were provoked by spirits, the bleeding offered the possibility of expulsing diseases. The consults were always free of charge, but the medicines or the bleeding were always paid for.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Apr 2005
• Date of issue
  Feb 2005