The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State, and Public Health, 1889-1930

April 2017

The Sanitation of Brazil: Nation, State and Public Health, by Gilberto Hochman. Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty. University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Celebrated as a major work since its original publication, The Sanitation of Brazil traces how rural health and sanitation policies influenced the formation of Brazil’s national public health system.

Gilberto Hochman’s pioneering study examines the ideological, social and political forces that approached questions of health and government action. The era from 1910 to 1930 offered unique opportunities for public health reform, and Hochman examines its successes and failures.

He looks at how health became a state concern, tying the emergence of public health policies to a nationalistic movement and to a convergence of the elites’ social consciousness with their political and material interests.

Politicians weighed the costs and benefits of state-run public health versus the burdens imposed by disease. Physicians and intellectuals, meanwhile, swayed them with warnings that endemic disease and official neglect might affect everyone–rich and poor, rural and urban, interior and coastal–if left unchecked. The book shows how disease and health were and are associated with nation-state building in Brazil.

Researcher Gilberto Hochman, Fiocruz, is associate editor of HCS-Manguinhos.

A first-ever English language edition, The Sanitation of Brazil opens up a classic study of modern Brazil to a new audience. The book  is already available for pre-sale in the website of the University of Illinois Press.

“Gilberto Hochman’s The Sanitation of Brazil is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the relationship between public health and the process of state formation. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the histories of health and medicine in the Americas.”–Jerry Dávila, author of Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

“We are very fortunate to have this lucid translation of Gilberto Hochman’s brilliant study of the expansion of public health in early twentieth century Brazil, a complex process that involved ideological and pragmatic calculations of regional autonomy, centralized authority, and the high human cost of disease across a vast and varied country. This history elucidates the foundations of Brazil’s extensive modern health system and offers a model for political analysis of the state and health.”–Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America

“Finally, Gilberto Hochman’s classic account of public health policy, citizenship, and state-building during Brazil’s First Republic is available beyond the Portuguese-reading world. This prize-winning volume offers a crucial historical perspective on the complex politics of constructing collective health, all the more resonant today as Brazil’s admired national health system is under assault.”–Anne-Emanuelle Birn, co-author of Textbook of Global Health, fourth edition

Funds for the publication of this translation were provided by the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and by the Ministerio da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.

Gilberto Hochman is a researcher and professor at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz.  He is also associate editor of the journal  Historia, Ciências, Saúde, Manguinhos.  His other books include Cuidar, Controlar, Curar and Políticas Públicas no Brasil, and Médicos Intérpretes do Brasil.

Articles by Gilberto Hochman published in HCS-Manguinhos:

Hochman, Gilberto, Benchimol, Jaime and Sá, Magali Romero. Health, colonialism, and development: an interview with historian Randall Packard. Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, June 2011, vol.18, no.2, p.565-584. ISSN 0104-5970