"Profession and Republic: the emergency and tragetory of the relations between medical professionalism and local power in the central paulista region (1889-1988)".

Abstract

The project intents to develop a research on the relation between the professionaliza-tion's process of the physicians of São Paulo's interior and the dynamics of local power in the central region of the State. The focus concerns to an important city of this region: São Carlos. We defend that this medical professionalization is a social process of long duration. The analy-sis is extended of the beginning of the Republic (in 1889), that is, the exactly moment of the rise of this region to the category of city, up to 1988, when the current Federal Constitution was promulgated, in a new age of political democratization after the military regimen, a moment in which the current System of Public Health in Brazil is instituted (the SUS). In this passage of Brazilian history, deep transformations had happened in social, economic, demographic and political terms. Furthermore, it also happened transformations in the physicians' environment and in the organization of the area of health. Such national changes had represented social proc-esses of long duration that had been assimilated by the city of São Carlos and translated as its peculiar structure of local power, implying consequences for the insertion of the medical group in the city and over their process of professionalization. In all this context of change, we defend that the local process of modernization (Kerbauy, 2000) conditioned, and was conditioned by, the extension of medical autonomy (Freidson, 2009). The research will use given bibliographi-cal, registers, statisticians and of interviews and verbal history.