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The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Sidney Chalhoub
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.

Extract

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as cholera and yellow fever epidemics ravaged the Old and the New World alike, Brazil seemed to enjoy the reputation of being a remarkably salubrious country. In spite of its geographical position, its climate and the abundance of those elements that prevailing medical wisdom considered conducive to the more aggravated forms of disease, the fact was that Brazil long remained free of the two most visible scourges of the times.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 See Cooper, Donald B., ‘Brazil's Long Fight against Epidemic Disease, 1849–1917, with Special Emphasis on Yellow Fever’, Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine1, vol. 51, no. 5 (1975), PP. 672–3Google Scholar.

2 M'William, J. O., ‘Some Account of the Yellow Fever Epidemy by which Brazil was Invaded in the Latter Part of the Year 1849’, Medical Times, London, vol. II (1851), p. 450Google Scholar.

3 Both the estimate of the number of people who contracted the disease and the death toll come from Rego, José Pereira, História e descrição da febre amarella epidêmica que grassou no Rio de Janeiro em 1850 (Rio de Janeiro, 1851)Google Scholar. The number of victims was compiled by Rego from hospital records and other sources after the epidemic, and was later adopted by the imperial government as the official figure. During the outbreak, however, the imperial government forbade newspapers to publish the daily number of victims, and did its best to conceal the real extent of the epidemic. The practice of concealing the number of victims was common in similar circumstances in Europe and the USA as well, and it obviously led to much confusion and wild speculation as to the real number of victims; see Lallemant, Roberto, Observações acerca da epidemia de febre amarella do ano de 1850 no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1851), pp. 1213Google Scholar. Lallemant himself estimated that 100,000 people had contracted the disease, and 10,000 had died. Another author, W. M'Kinlay, holds that ‘the statement most generally credited says, that 15,000 died between the 1st. December 1849 and 1st. September 1850’; see M'Kinlay, W., ‘Remarks on the Yellow Fever which Appeared of Late Years on the Coast of Brazil’, The Monthly Journal of Medical Science, London and Edinburgh, vol. XV (1852), p. 340Google Scholar. Croker Pennell thought that 13,000 deaths was a ‘most moderate’ estimate; see his A Short Report upon Yellow Fever as it Appeared in Brazil During the Summer of 1849–1850 (Rio de Janeiro, 1850), p. 9. The Lancet, London, vol. I (1852), p. 182, holds that ‘upwards of 12,000 persons had died in hospitals and private houses in Rio’. The fact remains, however, that Pereira Rego was the only one who bothered to indicate from where he was drawing his numbers.

4 See Cooper, Donald, ‘The New “Black Death”: Cholera in Brazil, 1855–1856’, in Kiple, Kenneth (ed.), The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People (Durham and London, 1987), pp. 235–56Google Scholar.

5 For detailed accounts of yellow fever epidemics in the US South and how public authorities and doctors tried to come to grips with them, see Carrigan, Jo Ann, ‘The Saffron Scourge: a History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905’, unpubl. PhD diss., The Louisiana State University, 1961Google Scholar; Duffy, John, Sword of Pestilence: the New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853 (Baton Rouge, 1966)Google Scholar; Warner, Margareth Ellen, ‘Public Health in the New South: Government, Medicine and Society in the Control of Yellow Fever’, unpubl. PhD. diss., Harvard University, 1983Google Scholar. For a study of the evolution of the epidemiological debate about yellow fever in Europe in the nineteenth century, see Coleman, William, Yellow Fever in the North: the Methods of Early Epidemiology (Madison, 1987)Google Scholar.

6 Almost all medical treatises in the nineteenth century had to recite these most general definitions of contagion and infection. I draw my definitions here from the entries for these words in a dictionary of medical terms which was quite popular in Imperial Brazil: Chernoviz, Pedro Luiz Napoleão, Diccionario de medicina popular (Paris, 1890, sixth edition)Google Scholar. There are some interesting discussions of the historical significance of the concept of infection: Ackerknecht, Erwin H., ‘Anticontagionism Between 1821 and 1867’, bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 22 (1948), pp. 562–93Google ScholarPubMed; Cooter, Roger, ‘Anticontagionism and History's Medical Record’, in Wright, Peter and Treacher, Andrew (eds.), The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar; Temkin, Owsei, ‘An Historical Analysis of the Concept of Infection’, The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore and London, 1977)Google Scholar.

7 The Junta was created by decree on 14 Sept. 1850, and the law which regulated its functioning was enacted on 29 Sept. 1851. It was composed of five members – all medical doctors – and had no executive power; it was devised as a board advisory to the Imperial government and to provincial governments as well. Unless otherwise noted, the following paragraphs, and in fact much of what follows in this paper, are based upon the surviving papers of the Junta. The major collections are: in the Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, ‘Higiene Pública: Atas’, which is the record of the proceedings of the meetings of the Junta, and ‘Higiene Pública: Avisos do Governo’, which contains basically government acts concerning sanitation and questions of public health in general; in the Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, ‘Ministério do Império/Junta Central de Higiene Pública: Ofícios e documentos diversos’, which contains the correspondence, reports and other papers sent by the Junta to the Ministério do Império, the branch of the Imperial government in charge of public health. These collections, except for minor flaws, cover extensively the last decades of the Brazilian Empire (1850–89). They are also particularly strong in documenting the situation in the city of Rio, even though the materials are by no means restricted to that city.

8 Donald B. Cooper, ‘Brazil's Long Fight Against Epidemic Disease’, p. 676.

9 José Pereira Rego, História e descrição da febre amarella epidêmica que grassou no Rio de Janeiro em 1850, p. 1.

10 See ‘Higiene Pública. Avisos do Governo (1850–4)’, Códice 8.3.7, fols. 199–207, Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

11 For evidence regarding serious tension within the Junta itself, see IS4–22, Ministério do Império/Junta Central de Higiene Pública, 1851–3. Paula Cândido, the first president of the Junta, was also a member of the Brazilian Parliament, and there he was forced to debate his moderately anticontagionist views with his peers; see Annaes do Parliamento Brasileiro, Câmara dos Deputados, 1850, vol. 2. Of course, doctors staged memorable brawls in the sections of the Academia Imperial de Medicina; see, for example, a debate in which Paula Cândido was involved in Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, August 1859.

12 Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, no. 11, Jan. 1858, pp. 310–19.

13 Nineteenth-century observers were unanimous regarding both the greater susceptibility of European immigrants and the stronger resistance of black people to yellow fever; the works cited by Lallemant, Pereira Rego, Croker Pennell etc. can be consulted as examples. As for present-day medical science, it is a well-established fact in genetic research that Africans and their descendants evolved blood characteristics – haemoglobin defences – that resist malaria parasites and forestall their multiplication; yellow fever, however, has failed to stimulate genetic research of the same kind. Kiple and King argue convincingly that ‘the black did possess innate yellow fever immunities, immunities that medical science has yet to acknowledge let alone explain, but immunities that nonetheless are discernible within the history of black, white, and red men and the yellow plague’; seen Kiple, Kenneth and King, Virginia, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 2 (the citation is from pp. 50–1)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The evidence from Rio – Africans were much affected in the 1850 outbreak, but usually suffered a mild form of the disease – seems to support Kiple and King's argument for Africans' innate yellow fever immunities. Of course, many Africans living in Rio at the time must have acquired immunity to yellow fever by having had the disease as children in their native continent – where yellow fever was often endemic. On the other hand, the intensification of Portuguese immigration to Rio starting in the late 1840s may have played an important role in the coming and the taking roots of the disease in the city – the number of yellow fever susceptibles increased enormously in those years. Besides the work cited by Kiple and King, a useful account of the mode of transmission of yellow fever can be found in Coleman, Yellow Fever in the North, ch. 1. As for Portuguese immigration to Rio, see de Alencastro, Luiz Felipe, ‘Prolétaires et esclaves: immigrés portugais et captifs africains a Rio de Janeiro – 1850–1872’, Cahiers du CRIAR, Publications de l'Universite de Rouen, no. 4 (1984)Google Scholar.

14 According to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, ‘Les vecteurs supposés de cette maladie desormais endémique au Brésil, étaient les Africains nouvellement arrivés au pays. Cette menace virale s'ajoute à la menace sociale déjà sous-jacente pour renforcer dramatiquement la méfiance de la population libre vis-à-vis des Africains’. Also, it was said in the Senate – in January 1850 – that Pemambuco had thus far escaped the epidemic because the illegal slave trade had ceased in that province. Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, ‘Le commerce des vivants: traite d'esclaves et “pax lusitana” dans l'Atlantique Sud’, thèse de doctorat, Université de Paris X, 1985, pp. 517 and 554.

15 As cited in Bethell, Leslie, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question (Cambridge, 1970), p. 334CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Chalhoub, Sidney, Visões da liberdade: uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte (São Paulo, 1990), pp. 186–98Google Scholar.

17 ‘The yellow fever had the French Army in its grip. Toussaint and Dessalines had known that this was coming, had calculated on it’, in James, C. L. R., The Black jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1989, 2nd ed.), p. 333Google Scholar; Geggus, , David, , ‘Yellow Fever in the 1790's: the British Army in Occupied Saint Domingue’, Medical History, vol. 23, no. 1 (1979), pp. 3858CrossRefGoogle Scholar. About yellow fever and slave revolt in the US South, see Carrigan, Jo Ann, ‘Yellow Fever: Scourge of the South’, in Savitt, Todd and Young, James H., Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville, 1988), p. 62Google Scholar.

18 The subject was controversial. Pereira Rego believed in the importation by the American vessel; História e descrição, p. 34; so did Paterson, A., ‘Observations on the Origin and Nature of the Bulam or Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in Bahia (Brazil), in the end of 1849 and the beginning of 1850’, The London Medical Gazette, vol. XLVII (1851), pp. 541ndash;7Google Scholar; also, J. O. M'William, ‘Some Account of the Yellow Fever’. Lallemant held the opposing view; see Observaçõtilde;es, p. 44; and so did Baker, T., ‘The Yellow Fever Epidemy in the Brazils’, Medical Times, London, vol. II (1851), pp. 489–91, 545Google Scholar; also, M'Kinlay, W., ‘Remarks on the Yellow Fever which Appeared of Late Years on the Coast of Brazil’, Monthly Journal of Medical Science, London and Edinburgh, vol. XV (1852), pp. 254–74; 335–52; 424ndash;41Google Scholar.

19 Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade p. 334.

20 Audouard, M.-F.-M., ‘Mémoire sur l'origine et les causes de la fièvre jaune, considérée comme étant principalement le résultat de l'infection des bâtiments négriers, d'après les observations faites à Barcelone en 1821, et au Port-du-Passage, en 1823’, Revue Médicale Française et Étrangère, Paris, vol. III (1824), pp. 360408Google Scholar; ‘La traite des noirs considérée comme la cause de la fièvre jaune’, Journal des Connaissances Médico-Chirurgicales, Paris, vol. VI (1838–9); Fiévre jaune et traite des noirs (Paris, 1849); ‘Sur la fièvre jaune qui règne en ce moment au Brésil, et sur l'origine de cette maladie’, Revue Médicale Française et Étrangère, Paris, vol. II (1850), 65–8; ‘Réponseau mémoire de M. le docteur DurandFardel, sous le titre: Des maladies contagieuses et infectieuses, à propos d'un autre mémoire sur la fièvre jaune et la traite des noirs’;, Ibid., vol. I (1851), pp. 399–408; ‘L'étiologie de la fièvre jaune dans ses rapports avec la navigation en général et la traite des noirs en particulier’, Ibid., vol. II (1853), pp. 656–72.

21 Rego, História e descricao, pp. 52, 86. Audouard was explicitly rebuked by doctors in Cuba; the debate is summarised, with the author openly favouring Audouard's critics, in Blacquière, L., ‘La traite des noirs considérée comme cause de la fièvre jaune’, Journal des Connaissances Médko-Chirurgicales, Paris, vol. VI (18381839), pp. 102–4Google Scholar. See also Durand-Fardel, M., ‘Des maladies contagieuses et infectieuses, á propos d'un mémoire de M. Audouard, intitulé: Fievre jaune et traite des noirs’, Revue Médkale Française et Étrangére, Paris, vol. II (1850), pp. 643–57Google Scholar. As late as 1875, an American doctor took the trouble to argue that there was no relationship between yellow fever and the slave trade. Audouard is not cited in the article, however; see Jones, J., ‘Researches on the Relations of the African Slave-Trade in the West Indies and Tropical America to Yellow Fever’, Virginia Medical Monthly, Richmond, vol. II (1875), pp. 1126Google Scholar.

22 Bareiros, J. F., ‘Relatório sobre a epidêmia que grassou nos navios de guerra estacionados no porto do Rio de Janeiro em 1849 a 1850’, Jornal da Sociedade das Sciencias Médicas de Lisboa, Segunda Série, vol. VII (1850), pp. 168–73, 336–47Google Scholar; ‘A Febre Amarella no Rio de Janeiro em 1873; Relatório da Comissão Central Portuguesa de Socorros’, Gazeta Médica de Lisboa, vol. XXII (1874), pp. 209–12, 238–41, 267–70, 293–8, 321–4, 376–81.

23 Roberto Lallemant, Observações acerca da epidemia de febre amarella, p. 10.

24 Cartwright, Samuel, ‘Prevention of Yellow Fever’, New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, no. 10 (11 1853), P 306Google Scholar; see also his ‘Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race’, Ibid., no. 7 (May 1851), pp. 692–713. For a detailed account of the context of Cartwright's and related ideas, see Kiple, and King, , Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, and Savitt, Todd L., Medicine and Slavery: the Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar.

25 Dundas, Robert, Sketches of Brazil; Including New Views on Tropical and European Fever, with Remarks on a Premature Decay of the System Incident to Europeans on their Return from Hot Climates (London, 1852)Google Scholar.

26 Dundas, Sketches of Brazil, p. 51.

27 Dundas, Sketches of Brazil, pp. 104, 209.

28 Dundas, Sketches of Brazil, p. 324.

29 Relatório do Ministério do Império, for th e year 1858, Anexo D, which is entitled ‘Memórias Históricas das Faculdades de Medicina e de Direito’.

30 Gobineau was later appointed Minister of France in Brazil. He lived in the capital from March 1869 to April 1870 and enjoyed a close friendship with D. Pedro II, the Brazilian Emperor, who seemed to listen attentively to Gobineau's long expositions. Of course, Gobineau was extremely critical of miscegenation and its alleged results, thought that Brazilians were comparable to monkeys etc, but it seems that his friendship with the Emperor made him an advocate of European immigration to Brazil in the 1870s. See Biddiss, Michael D., Father of Racist Ideology: the Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London, 1970), pp. 201–6Google Scholar; and Raeders, George, O inimigo cordial do Brasil: O Conde de Gobineau no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1988)Google Scholar.

31 For official figures concerning the number of deaths from yellow fever in Rio, year by year, from 1850 to 1907, see Barbosa, Plácido and @Rezende, Cássio, Os serviços de saúde pública no Brasil, especialmente na cidade do Rio de Janierio de 1808 a 1907 (esboço historico e legislaçáo) (Rio de Janeiro, 1909), pp. 496–8Google Scholar. For an account of the campaign for the eradication of yellow fever, see Stepan, Nancy, Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Policy, 1890–1920 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

32 See Rego, José Pereira, Memória histórca das epidemias defebre amarela e cbolera-morbo que tern reinado no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1875)Google Scholar. Rego, had associated sewage and corticos with yellow fever a year earlier in his Esboço histórico das epidemias que tern grassado na cidade do Rio de Janeiro desde 1830 a 1870 (Rio de Janeiro, 1872)Google Scholar. See also the discussions in the Academia Imperial de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, which are transcribed in Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, Tomo XXV (1873), nos. 1 (pp. 431), 2 (pp. 43–57), 3 (pp. 92–4), 5 (pp. 168–75), 6 and 7 (pp. 202–5)Google Scholar.

33 Of course, public officials were also very much afraid of what they construed as the ‘dangerous classes’ see Chalhoub, Sidney, Trabalho, lare botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (Sáo Paulo, 1986), pp. 3558Google Scholar. I described the whole process in some detail in ‘A guerra contra os cortiços: cidade do Rio, 1850–1906’, Primeira Versáo, no. 19 (1990), Campinas, UNICAMP, pp. 1–48; and then summarised it again in ‘Dangerous Classes’, Trabalhadores, no. 6 (1990), pp. 2–22. A good history of cortiços in Rio is Vaz, Lilian Fessler, ‘Contribuiçáo ao estudo da produçáo e transformaçáo do espaço da habitaçáo popular: as habitaçóes coletivas no Rio Antigo’, M.A. thesis, Rio de Janeiro, PUR/UFRJ, 1985Google Scholar. See also Rocha, Oswaldo Porto, A era das demolições: cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1920 (Rio de Janeiro, 1986)Google Scholar.

34 For one of the earliest statements of this rationale for Rio, see Ribeiro, Cândido Barata, Quaes as medidas sanitárias que devem ser aconselhadas para impedir O desenvolvimento e propação dafebre amarela na cidade do Rio de Janeiro? Thesis, Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, 1877Google Scholar. With the establishment of the Republican regime, Barata Ribeiro was appointed the first mayor of Rio in the early 1890s.

35 The little they did is described in Carvalho, Lia de Aquino, Habitações populares: Rio de Janeiro, 1886–1906 (Rio de Janeiro, 1986)Google Scholar.

36 Sidney Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade, ch. 3.

37 For a history of the idea of flooding the labour market with European immigrants, seev Hall, Michael, ‘The origins of mass immigration in Brazil, 1871–1914’, unpubl. PhD diss., Columbia University, 1969, chs. 3, 4 and 5Google Scholar. See also Andrews, George Reid, Slacks and Whites in Saõ Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison, 1991)Google Scholar, chs. 2 and 3. The quotation is from Andrews, p. 58.

38 Rego, Memória histórica das epidemias de febre amarela e cholera-morbo, pp. 3–4. The Brazilian doctors' case for the relationship between yellow fever and immigration is well apprehended in Rey, H., ‘Notes sur la fièvre jaune au Brésil d'après les publications récentes des médecins brésiliens’, Archives de médecine navale, Paris, vol. XXVIII (1877), pp. 277–91, 572–92, 428–39Google Scholar. In Cuba as well, yellow fever ‘in the last decades of the nineteenth century (…) acquired new importance because of the obstacle it posed to white immigration’ see Stepan, Nancy, ‘The Interplay Between Socio-economic Factors and Medical Science: Yellow Fever Research, Cuba and the United StatesSocial Studies of Science, vol. 8 (1978), p. 400CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

39 José Pereira Rego, Memória histórica, pp. 218–19.

40 As Samuel Adamo thoroughly demonstrates, the federal government's public health campaign in the first years of the twentieth century resulted in a significant decline in mortality from infectious and contagious diseases; however, the benefits were unequally distributed and high mortality rates continued to be the plight of the Afro-Brazilian population in Rio; see Adamo, Samuel, ‘The Broken Promise: Race, Health, and Justice in Rio de Janeiro, 1890–1940’, unpubl. PhD. diss., University of New Mexico, 1983Google Scholar. In a comparative study of tuberculosis in Brazil and the USA, Dalila Kiple shows that Brazilian doctors usually explained black people's greater vulnerability to the disease in environmental terms, while North American medical men were more likely to embrace ‘Darwinian racial tenets’ in dealing with the subject; however, both medical communities ‘made the issue of healing incidental, if not irrelevant, to their discussion’, and little was done to tame the disease among black people until well into the twentieth century. See Kiple, Dalila de Sousa, ‘Darwin and Medical Perceptions of the Black: a Comparative Study of the United States and Brazil, 1871–1918’, unpubl. PhD. diss., Bowling Green State University, 1987Google Scholar. As for the opinion that smallpox was more rampant among slaves and ‘people of colour’, see Guarany, Soeiro, ‘Da vacinaçáo e revacinação no Brasil, memoria apresentada á Academia Imperial de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, a 16 de maio de 1863’, Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, vol. 15 (08 1863), p. 117Google Scholar.

41 See Relatório do Ministério do Império, 1859, Anexo G, ‘Relatório do Presidente da Junta Central de Higiene Pública’, part II, ‘Reflexões sobre a tísica pulmonar’, pp. 6–12. For a criticism of Cândido's plan, on the grounds that it was too timid, see the article by de Meneses, Bezerra in Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, no. 3 (05 1859)Google Scholar. Cândido's piece clearly indicated that he thought the trouble lay in sanitary conditions in the workplace; however, he was rather hesitant in recommending strict government vigilance of workshops and factories.

42 For the activities of the Vaccination Institute, see the collection ‘Ministério do Império/Instituto Vacínico. Ofícios e documentos diversos’, Arquivo National do Rio de Janeiro. For the urban revolt against compulsory smallpox vaccination in Rio in 1904, see, among others, de Carvalho, José Murilo, Os bestializados: O Rio de Janeiro e a República que nãofoi (São Paulo, 1987)Google Scholar; Meade, Teresa Ann, ‘Community Protest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, During the First Republic, 1890–1917’, unpubl. PhD. diss., Rutgers University, 1984Google Scholar; Needell, Jeffrey, ‘The Revolta Contra Vacinaof 1904: the Revolt Against “Modernization” in Belle-Époque Rio de Janeiro’, Hispanic American Historic Review, vol. 67, no. 2 (05 1987)Google ScholarPubMed; Sevcenko, Nicolau, A revolta da vacina: mentes insanas em corpos rebeldes (São Paulo, 1984)Google Scholar. None of these studies, however, approaches the question of the importance of the previous history of the vaccination service itself for understanding the 1904 revolt.

43 What follows was somewhat inspired by the reading of Fields, Barbara Jeanne, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America’, New Left Review, no. 181 (05/06, 1990), pp. 95118Google Scholar; Barbara Jeanne Fields, ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, in Kousser, J. Morgan, and MacPherson, James M. (eds.), Region, Race and Reconstruction (New York, 1982), pp. 143–77Google Scholar and, in the same volume, Thomas C. Holt, ‘“An Empire over the Mind”: emancipation, race, and ideology in the British West Indies and the American South’;, pp. 283–313.

44 See Michael Hall ‘The Origins of Mass Immigration’, chs. 3, 4 and 5, and George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, chs. 2 and 3. For a history of racial ideas in nineteenth-century Brazil which shows in a masterly way the interplay of racial ideology and the struggle to redefine labour relations, see de Azevedo, Célia M. Marinho, Onda negra, medo branco. O negro no imaginário das elites: século XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 1987)Google Scholar. For a study which shows a shift from cultural to racial – ‘scientific’ – stereotyping regarding African Brazilians in the press of the Province of São Paulo in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, Retrato em branco e negro: jornais, escravos e cidadãos em São Paulo no final do século XIX (São Paulo, 1987)Google Scholar.

45 As cited in Bodstein, Regina Cele de A., ‘Práticas sanitárias e classes populates do Rio de Janeiro’, Kevista do Rio de Janeiro, vol. 1, no. 4 (1986), pp. 42–3Google Scholar.