A polícia médica como atribuição das câmaras municipais: instituições, agentes, relações de poder e jurisdições de saúde em Minas Gerais (1770/1850)

Abstract

The object of this thesis focuses on the analysis of the medical police carried out by municipal councils in Minas Gerais between the final decades of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. By medical police I refer to the numerous responsibilities that municipalities had, covering everything from health surveillance to the registration of medical certificates and other health professionals. It is important to consider the use of the concept of Police State as the analytical key used here. This term is often used by the author José Subtil, with whom this thesis is closely related. By Police State we can point to the existence of European governances that throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries engendered a true art of government, based on the rationality of its guidelines, in an increasing alignment with science and the men who represented it (such as doctors, surgeons, engineers). Governances that now have two central entities in their sights (to undergo standardization): population and territory. The entire structuring movement of this new government paradigm was based on the lines of cameralism, which already outlined the notion that a State can only be powerful, large and rich if it has a healthy and active population. A vast treatise would address this issue, guiding the ruler on how to “well manage” the territory and its wealth and the lives of the population. In this sense, public health would be one of the areas that would gain greater importance and protagonism, precisely because it is directly aligned with people's living conditions. The spheres that made up the State thus began to take on health-related responsibilities, such as municipal councils, which would have obligations such as: building hospitals, vaccinating the local population (against bladder cancer, the name given to smallpox), building medical-surgical colleges in certain municipalities, etc. The approach addressed here is one that privileges existing political communications between colonial (in the context of the late 18th century), municipal, provincial and imperial authorities, and institutions such as Minas Gerais municipal councils (those that made the most demands in terms of public health among the period 1770/1850), Conselho Ultramarino, General Council of Minas Gerais, Provincial Assembly of Minas. The objective, therefore, is to analyze the administration of public health by State agencies such as those mentioned above, after all, public health has become a government agenda. The documentary section made here is that of requests, petitions, exchanges of correspondence between authorities and institutions, that is, State documentation, shaped by the communication circuits established between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th.