Curar as prisões: a articulação entre saber médico e discurso penitenciário no Império do Brasil (1830-1850)

Abstract

To explore the articulations between medical gaze and the emergency of the prisional institution in the Empire of Brazil is the objective of this paper. Even in a way of legitimation and consolidation, in the middle of the 19th century, the medical gaze, based on the principle of prevention, enters in many aspects of the social life; interposes in the society in places and institutions that are characterized as supposed obstacles to the public health, order and discipline. The Brazilian doctors, looking at what they thought as civilized world and based on the hygienic discourse, purpose some actions considered modernizing, that would have to be followed by the government to put the Empire in tune to the progress. Among those themes, it is possible to localize the punishment practices. The materiality of the referred interventions and propositions about the medical gaze is, for example, in the thesis presented by the doctors to the College of Medicine to conclude their academic formation. Regarding to the prisons, the study of Cesário Eugênio Gomes de Araújo stands out, presented to the Medical College of Rio de Janeiro, in 1844, in which the doctor makes a diagnosis about the prisons in the Empire and purposes a penitentiary reform, that had to be linked to the foundation of the Court Correctional. If the statement that there is an exteriority of the prisons related to the criminal theory, the prisional institute, to consolidate itself as central punishment, effective and universal, still lacked, in the 19th century, especially in Brazil, of legitimation and proof. In the articulation of knowledge to the production of this legitimation, the medical gaze, as the present paper intends to demonstrate, is included. Therefore, investigating the prescriptions of a doctor to the formation of a prison, according to him, able to resocialize, rehabilitate and correct delinquent individuals is an important topic to the comprehension of how was constructed the consolidation of the privation of freedom as universal punitive form and superior to the others.