Vozes de uma Reforma Sanitária: trabalhadores, sanitaristas e suburbanos na imprensa carioca da Primeira República

Abstract

Based on the understanding that the formation of public values and political culture are constituent parts of politics and processes of historical change, this thesis addresses the debate on sanitation in commercial and popular newspapers as an integral part of the process of politicization of health that led to the Brazilian Sanitary Reform of 1920. The analysis of different commercial journals of the period points out that the members of the Pro-Sanitation Movement articulated themselves to the press through their networks and made of this communication media a political instrument to effect institutional changes for public health. Between 1916 and 1920, the interpretation that repositioned health as a central problem for national formation and responsibility of the federal government became sedimented in the public debate and established as a part of the common sense, anticipating the consolidation of the institutional apparatus. The public vocalization of the Pro-Sanitation Movement's arguments and proposals did not find an apathetic or indifferent audience among the popular segments. The consideration of the newspapers produced by popular segments and published in the period before the publicizing of the pro-sanitation argument identified that health was an object of claims and articulated with different agendas of popular struggles. Their formulations on health and illness anticipated elements that would be present in the theses of the pro-sanitation movement, such as the relations between abandonment by the State and illness, as well as between life and working conditions and health. During the period of greater publicization of the pro-sanitation argument, workers and residents of the suburbs established affinities and criticisms to the sanitation proposal. The sanitation to which the workers referred kept approximations and intersections with the health reformers proposal, while it pointed to other meanings linked to its own grammar of struggle. Through journalism, wider segments of the population politicized health, pointed out contradictions and gaps between the arguments and practices of health authorities, gave new meanings to the word sanitation and claimed improvements in their living and working conditions. Finally, the thesis argues that the process of Sanitary Reform set in motion in the 1920s can be understood as a moment that did not end in the formulations and actions of a particular political and intellectual elite, but also harboured the agency of subalternized social segments.