Health and slavery in the island of Santa Catarina: second half of the nineteenth century (1851-1888)

Abstract

This project has as objective to investigate the health of slaves on the Island of Santa Catarina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Uses as source of analysis newspapers published in Desterro between 1851 and 1888. There, the bodies of slaves were described in the advertisements of escapes, complaints of mistreatment, suicide notes and articles about campaigns of modernization and sanitation of the city where the popular healing practices became the object of control and intervention. Seeks to establish an identification of the physical characteristics of the slaves described in the pages of newspapers in order to decode the their health problems considering it significances for medical or popular knowledge at the time. Seeks to understand the mental universe of the captives in order to check if the escapes, suicide attempts and popular healing practices, constituted strategies for survival and self-affirmation of life against health problems and mistreatment they faced. Given the problems of diseases, the objective is also to understand the representations of captives during the second half of the nineteenth century. Attempts to verify, therefore, social behavior linked to the slave system, the sanitarian campaigns and abolitionist ideals which become present in that society. In proposing these approaches, it becomes necessary to use documentary sources besides the newspapers cited. This will include medical textbooks, literature relating to folk medicine and travel literature, the death certificates, the reports related to the problem of health and disease, provincial reports and official speeches, books of records of patients in hospitals, Laws, Decrees and Regulations of the municipality and the Empire, Conduct Codes and police records. (AU)