Mármore e Barbárie: o nascimento da medicina política

Abstract

There are many ways of building walls. Marble and Barbarism is about the disassembled walls that were removed to make space for another city a little more than a hundred years ago. This thesis is crossed by three vectors: the urban transformations in the time of the Imperial Court, the practices of social hygiene and their relations to experiences of epidemic, the black citizenship in the context bordering the May 13th. We call political medicine or medical-hygienist dispositive the network that mixes the three vectors. Dismantling those walls was not intended to bring people closer, but to solve an excess of presence. Fixed presences but excessive and undesirable in the Old City, such as the miasmas, the manumitted slaves, the free, the anti-aesthetical and anti-hygienic elements incorporated in some types of habitation. With the desire for social and ethnical cleansing, the attack on excessively free people was a fundamental part of the process of recolonization of bodies that defined the formation of the Republic.