Dos pavilhões da memória: vozes da infância nos preventórios Brasil e Portugal

Abstract

This study aims to present aspects about memory of the healthy children of parents who were leprosy patients, compulsorily isolated in leprosy institutions by the state s designation in Brazil, from the beginning of the 20th century untill the 1980s, and in Portugal between the years of 1940 untill 1970. Through the methodology of qualitative research based on the technique of oral history, it will be presented the memories of those people, in both countries, who lived or worked in preventoriums, institutions created to assist children after the separation of their parents. It is analyzed the public policy that culminated in the creation of these preventoriums, their means of operation and the role they played in the lives of their inmates. We could conclude that such institutions were endowed with different models of discipline, violence, vigilance and control, besides eugenic and hygienist practices to assist those inmate children. On the other hand, in these places it was also possible to experience negotiation contexts, resistances and satisfaction by those children. The deponents showed that although their histories were invisible to the society, this was not able to remove them from the condition of historical individuals, nor take away the protagonism in the figth against the prejudice and stima imposed by the disease