Plague Ports by Myron Echenberg

Author:Myron Echenberg [Echenberg, Myron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Modern, 19th Century, Medical
ISBN: 9780814722336
Google: X4kUCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2010-04-15T16:13:56+00:00

Oswaldo Cruz, Vital Brazil, and Brazilian National Science

For all his reserve, he [Cruz] was a compelling figure, a man of intensely felt enthusiasm for science, of great resourcefulness, able to communicate this enthusiasm and the need for hard work and accuracy to others. He was a natural teacher and had a lifelong influence on those who worked closely with him.

Nancy Stepan, 197610

Perhaps because Brazil’s cities and towns had been so frequently attacked by yellow fever, public health authorities were quicker than their Argentine counterparts to respond to the possibilities that bacteriology offered in the battle against infectious disease. Two physicians in Sao Paulo, Emílio Ribas (1862–1925) and especially Adolfo Lutz (1855–1940), are cases in point. Although as yet unaware of the links between mosquitoes and transmission of the disease, Ribas had led a major sanitary cleanup of breeding grounds during an outbreak of yellow fever in Campinas in 1895. On the basis of this success, the state of Sao Paulo appointed Ribas as the director of sanitary services in 1898. When news of the Americans’ breakthrough on yellow fever in Cuba reached Ribas, he launched a more intensive statewide extermination program. Lutz, the Brazilian-born son of Swiss immigrants, had studied bacteriology in Europe in the late 1870s, met Lister and Pasteur, and began a distinguished career on his return during which he published nearly two hundred scientific articles. Named as the director of the newly created Sao Paulo Bacteriological Institute in 1893, Lutz collaborated closely with Ribas on yellow fever, produced the first demonstrated proof of the presence of cholera in Brazil, and showed that the allegedly unique “Paulista fevers” were in fact cases of typhoid.

Whereas Lutz and Ribas were pioneers, two younger men, Vital Brazil (1865–1950) and especially Oswaldo Cruz (1872–1917), were to stand even taller among the competent and well-informed group of medical officials involved with infectious diseases in Brazil. Vital Brazil rose from modest origins to become, as his obituary in the Estado do Sao Paulo put it on May 9, 1950, “one of the greatest Brazilians of our time.” His picture on the 10,000-cruzeiro banknote helps demonstrate that Vital Brazil is, along with Oswaldo Cruz and Carlos Chagas, among Brazil’s most internationally famous medical personalities.

After graduating from Rio’s medical school in 1891, Vital Brazil began his medical career as a private practitioner in the backcountry of the state of Sao Paulo, where he encountered numerous cases of poisonous snakebite among his patients. In his spare time he worked in his makeshift laboratory to study venom typologies. This work helped him become the head of a new Serotherapy Institute at Butantán, outside Sao Paulo, in 1899. In a few short years he became the world’s foremost authority on antivenomous serotherapy, and his laboratory was producing a product that would save thousands of lives.

We have already met the second and more famous young Brazilian phenomenon, Oswaldo Gonçalves Cruz. Although he began life with more advantages than Vital Brazil did, Cruz rose far above the station of his father, who was a small-town physician in the state of Sao Paulo when Oswaldo was born in 1872.

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