Escola de Enfermagem Carlos Chagas (1933-1950): a Deus - pela humanidade - para o Brasil

Abstract

The theme of this work is the history of Carlos Chagas Nursing School (Escola de Enfermagem Carlos Chagas, EECC), founded in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, on July 7th , 1933, which was the origin of the current Nursing School of Minas Gerais Federal University. The study focused the period from the creation of the school until 1950, when there were changes in its organization and administrative subordination. The goal was to analyze the process of institutionalization of EECC and, in the dynamic of this movement, learn the academic culture that was constituted on it. In an attempt to understand the constitution of a remarkable institutional culture, it was privileged the analysis of the academic culture from its basilar elements the subjects, the times and spaces and the academic knowledge. The theoretical and methodological contributions of the academic culture and the researches developed in the field of the history of the educative institutions and of the genre question were fundamental for the research. Besides, the condition of first nursing school that would supposedly follow the nightingale teaching system in a Brazilian state out of the Republic Capital contributed for the first directors to turn their attention to the establishment of the institutional history and memory. This way, this study was only possible in the coming and going between the memory and the archive. Its main sources were the ones that can be found in the Memory Center of UFMG Nursing School, carefully registered and preserved in the first years of EECC operation. It can be stated, with this work, that the EECC, in its institutionalization process, constituted and legitimated an academic culture that gave singularity to it. This way, it was given social visibility to an institutional culture that was being constituted at the same time that representations of the School, the nursing and the professional were being elaborated, full of distinctively love for Brazil, patriotism and religiosity. That is to say that, in EECC, there was a configuration of an academic culture that gave to it institutional identity in consonance with the intellectual debate reigning in Brazil in 1920s and 1930s, in which the national identity was put as a point of first importance. It was realized an institutional identity that in its materiality and in its academic practices times, spaces, curricula, didactic materials, evaluative and control processes, teaching body, among others should be similar to the official rules of the Brazilian system in general and to the nursing teaching in particular. Finally, it can be said that the EECC, in its institutionalization process, searched to get a position as a catholic Brazilian school in Minas Gerais, getting a great allied for its struggles, the Catholic Church, represented by Laís Netto dos Reys and by other intellectual catholic militants. Thus, it can also be said that the school, in the studied period, acted in a way to put in practice its motto: to God for the humanity for Brazil.