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A n a i s d o I HM T
Concerns: Trajectories of Services and Biomedical
Research; Global health, Epidemiology and Public
Health Policies and Practices in Lusophone Africa.
Besides questions from the audience, 6 discussants
commented on the papers and provided suggestions
for their improvement.The papers presented and dis-
cussed during the meeting, covered a wide range of
issues, including epidemiology, health systems and
services, disease control and eradication programmes,
biomedical knowledge and research, military and civil
medicine, veterinary medicine, colonial and post-co-
lonial medicine, entomology, medical networks, and
international and global health. A summary of the pa-
pers follows below.
Although far from pretending to form a representa-
tive sample of the current state of the historiography
on tropical medicine, the papers do provide valuable
insights into the ongoing debate on the issue. The
main themes that emerged can be summarised under
the following headings, i.e. the production and cir-
culation of medical knowledge in tropical regions,
the globalization of tropical medical schools, medical
networks and tropical medical expertise; the entan-
glement of public health and disease control; the con-
tinuity of colonial and post-colonial trends in public
health and disease control; the diversity of trajecto-
ries in the combat against neglected tropical diseases
(NTDs). The main pathologies discussed at the meet-
ing were leishmaniosis, leprosy, sexually transmitted
diseases (STDs) and HIV, malaria, trypanosomiasis,
yellow fever, bubonic plague, schistosomiasis, oncho-
cerciasis and tropical mycoses. In terms of the topics
discussed, the most recurrent were epidemiology and
disease control, health systems, entomology and biog-
raphy.While the papers demonstrate the trans-national
nature of tropical medicine, they also engage with na-
tional and imperial narratives which were deeply as-
sociated with the implementation of public health and
disease control strategies. The great diversity of geo-
graphical spaces, ranging from Angola, Belgian Con-
go, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Ethiopia, France, Goa (India),
Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Portugal, illustrates
the multiplicity of contexts and experiences discussed
during the meeting. Given the celebrations of the 115
th
anniversary of the IHMT, it is by no means surprising
that CPLP (Comunidade de Países de Lingua Portu-
guesa, Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries)
countries formed the mainstay of presentations and
debate. Thus, the encounter served to strengthen the
cooperation maintained by the IHMT and its research-
ers with CPLP countries including Brazil and African
countries with Portuguese as Official Language (PAL-
OP).The following sections provide a summary of the
papers presented at the meeting.
3.1.
Tropical Medicine:
Perspectives on the Evolution and
Circulation of Medical Knowledge
.
Opening the first thematical session, Matheus Alves
Duarte da Silva (École des Hautes Etudes en Scienc-
es Sociales, EHESS, Paris) and Daniel Dutra Coelho
Braga (Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ) pre-
sented ‘TheTropics without theTropical: French Naval
Medicine on the threshold of Tropical Medicine (1882-
1898)’. The paper discussed the career of the French
Navy physician Paul-Louis Simond (1858-1947), as well
as his writings. An early member of the Pasteur Insti-
tute, Simond observed diseases such as leprosy, plague
and yellow fever in tropical regions such as French
Guyana, Bombay (India) and Rio de Janeiro, from 1882
onwards. In his writings, he applied the methods and
assumptions associated with medical topography, popu-
lar in the naval medical field, and bacteriology. In his
dissertation on the transmission of the bubonic plague,
which was published in 1898, right after his mission
to India to study the disease, he depicted the plague as
mainly related to precarious social and economic condi-
tions which intensified interactions between men, rats
and fleas.Therefore, he argued that bubonic plague was
not ultimately caused by factors only intrinsic to the
tropics. A careful analysis of his writings demonstrates
the complex history of medical practices in tropical
areas, as well as the multiple historical links between
tropical medicine and other medical fields, such as the
French Naval medicine.
In the ‘South American Evangelical Union and its im-
pact inTropical Medicine Missionary in Central Brazil’,
Heliel Gomes de Carvalho (Departmento de História,
Universidade Federal de Goiás) and Sandro Dutra e Sil-
va (Centro Universitário de Anápolis, UniEvangélica)
looked at the historical impact of an under-researched
subject, i.e. the South American Evangelical Union
(SAEU), a British organization composed of missionar-
ies, physicians and health professionals who were active
in Central Brazil in the first half of 20
th
century. This
European religious organization arose from the union
of three missions that operated in Argentina, Peru and
Brazil in the late 19
th
century.With regard to SAEU’s its
work in Brazil, the authors highlighted parallel contem-
porary historical perspectives: (i) the opening of ports
to friendly nations of Portugal in 1808; (ii) Victorian-
era foreign policy (1837-1901), which associated mis-
sionary and medicine with its expansion abroad; (iii)
and the reaction of the founding institutions of SAEU
on the positioning of Edinburgh Conference in 1910,
which considered the work of missionaries in Latin
America, including those working in the medical field,
unnecessary. The protestant missions engaged in so