Discurso oitocentista dos médicos da província de Minas Gerais: um olhar sobre a amamentação

Abstract

The nineteen century Brazilian medicine is delineated by an advance in the process of a social legitimation through the high level instruction institutions with an enlargement of his sphere of competences introducing new propositions for a deep understanding and dissemination of the medical knowledge. The society regenerative speech, as a way of a medical inference in the family, together with the goal to supersede the private, concurred for the strengthening of the sun-mother dyad. The medicine convocation for that the woman could occupy the pivot of the family stage, brought attention to a personage: the child and this encouraged considerations in different fields of science. The action of feed a child merged with the course of the health, with the childhood and the family and with the own woman history. The intention is to investigate quantitatively the maternal nurse properly upon the social-historic focus in theses of the mineiro doctors which graduated in the nineteen century in Rio de Janeiro Medicine University. The considerations seek for a better understanding of the mother-woman role in the care of a family, taking a new evaluation of the distance that set us apart from the remote eighteen century. The search was accomplished from fundamental sources, in his origin, from the author work and from references of documents and files of the Arquivo Público Mineiro in the city of Belo Horizonte. The evaluation of the medical speech was done knowing that the theses were written by people highly humanistic and scientific educated , while Brazilian thinking elite, in favour of a female education in order to achieve the goal of being a good mother and a good wife. Strategies imbued of the biological reductionism that express themselves by the verticalization of the constructions and reduce the breast-feeding process to a natural attribute supposed to be common to all of mammal species, place the white elite mother as responsible for the health of her progeny. Failure feelings may have been engendered to the nursing-mother when the cultural condicionants that pervade the breast-feeding was disregarded and when the chance for the woman to learn about this was not provide. To insist in stereotyped and reductionist models may determine a high level of responsibility and guilt to the individual of the process, principally in case of acts regulated by the society as breast-feeding. Epistemological aspects of the paradigm with meanings which emerge from the common sense couldnt be neglected. The comprehension of the historicity is important for delineation of actions of assistance in the name of the medical rationality.