August 2018
In recent decades, historiography has abandoned “essentialist” approaches championing a step-by-step, homogenizing interpretation of assistance institutions and instead opted for analyses that ensure the historical authenticity, specificity, and complexity of the aid structures which emerged from the mid-eighteenth century in different regions of the western world.
After this time, care for the poor and the role of hospitals would not emerge unscathed from the semantic resignification proposed by rationalist lines of thought based on the states, which emulated increasingly “national” policies, reclassifying the notions of charity, poverty, and social utility.
While the states were effectively key actors, capable of replacing charity with abstract notions of civility and citizenship, the model based on elite participation in line with new meanings of activity (without removing the old religious implications) remained personalistic and localist, denouncing the intimate relationship between the state and grassroots-level entities that gave rise to assistance activities.
The formulation of “public” policies carried out by individuals and/or private institutions was a key element in understanding the genesis and the structuring of political powers, in both national and local terms. In this sense, any mechanical separation between delay and progress, classifying assistance as an intransigent archaism, proves damaging. The challenge is to understand the success of traditional institutions which also were the main vectors of scientific thought and of the reinvention of modern assistance.
Analysis of the historic meanings aid institutions assumed, along with their political relevance in the formation of the state, encompasses the two main lines which guide proposals for this special edition: 1) understanding the historicity of the assistance activity repertoires within the contexts in which they were formulated, and 2) historical analysis of how the relations of power within the institutions formulated, denied, and made choices, and were fundamental in the sense of structuring the dynamics of the assistance network contained within the Brazilian states.
The deadline to submit papers for this special edition is August 31, 2018. Original articles may be submitted in Portuguese, Spanish, or English. Texts will be accepted to appear in the Análise [Analysis], Imagens [Images], Nota de Pesquisa [Research Note], and Fontes [Sources] sections.
Details of the manuscript submission guidelines can be found here. Only papers sent through the online submission system will be considered.
See this call for papers in Portuguese.
Read about health and philanthropy in HCSM:
Benchimol, Jaime. Missionaries of sciences: the Rockfeller Foundation and Latin America. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Jun 1995, vol.2, no.1
Hoefte, Rosemarijn. Cleansing the world of the germ of laziness: hygiene, sanitation, and the Javanese population in Suriname. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Dec 2014, vol.21, no.4
Martin-Frechilla, Juan José. El dispositivo venezolano de sanidad y la incorporación de los médicos exiliados de la Guerra Civil española. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Jun 2008, vol.15, no.2.
Gachelin, Gabriel and Opinel, Annick. Malaria epidemics in Europe after the First World War: the early stages of an international approach to the control of the disease. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, June 2011, vol.18, no.2.
