{"id":94328,"date":"2013-01-18T16:19:32","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T18:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=94328"},"modified":"2017-03-06T13:49:25","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T16:49:25","slug":"therapies-for-the-tropics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/therapies-for-the-tropics\/","title":{"rendered":"Therapies for the tropics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Il farmacista, Pietro Longhi<\/span>In 1735, the Officina de Miguel Rodrigues <\/em>in Lisbon published the first edition of the book Er\u00e1rio mineral<\/em> (“Mineral treasury”), describing the medical practices employed in the capitania<\/em> (now state) of Minas Gerais \u2013 the epicenter of the Colonial Brazilian gold rush. The author of the work, described as one of the first treatises on Brazilian or tropical medicine written in Portuguese, was the barber surgeon Lu\u00eds Gomes Ferreira. A Portuguese native from the Douro region, Gomes Ferreira had pursued his profession in both Portugal and India, and had lived for three years in Salvador before settling down near the city of Ouro Preto, then known as Vila Rica.<\/p>\n

When he moved to that part of the colony in 1710, Gomes Ferreira’s intent was to make his fortune in mining. But upon realizing that prospecting for gold would not bring much of a profit, he decided to ply a parallel trade by applying the curative arts he had learned in Portugal. After all, there were few physicians or barber surgeons in the region, and caring for the sick could potentially be advantageous. He became famous for his cures, relocated time and again in search of new opportunities, and did not leave Minas Gerais until 1731, when he crossed the Atlantic to return to his homeland.<\/p>\n

The information in the book was based on the accumulated experience of two decades spent treating powerful slave masters and their infirm captives in a land distant and distinct from Portugal. Upon returning to his native country, Gomes Ferreira wrote the Er\u00e1rio mineral <\/em>in less than a year. In the book, he describes the main woes that afflicted the local denizens, especially the slaves, and the treatments he deployed to fight these sicknesses. He believed that the capitania<\/em>‘s cold, wet climate was to blame for nearly every ailment. Diet, housing conditions, and the fact that mining forced slaves to spend many hours in the water or underground were additional factors he associated with disease.<\/p>\n

As the prevalent living conditions and health troubles in Minas Gerais were different from those in Europe, the barber-surgeon had to adapt to the new reality. \u201cGomes Ferreira had greater freedom and sensibility to absorb knowledge from other sources than European medicine,\u201d says historian J\u00fania Ferreira Furtado from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), who coordinated the 2002 publication of a new edition of the book, with support from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the Minas Gerais Research Foundation (Fapemig).<\/p>\n

\"\"

Retablo de los santos Abd\u00f3n y Sen\u00e9n \/ Jaime Huguet<\/span>Performing surgeries, including amputations, was one of the barber- surgeon’s tasksRetablo de los santos Abd\u00f3n y Sen\u00e9n \/ Jaime Huguet<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

For that reason, the book includes many of the remedies used by indigenous peoples and added to the repertoire of colonial Brazilian medicine by the inhabitants of S\u00e3o Paulo. Prescriptions that included bones, fats, whole animals or parts of them, saliva, urine, and many regional plants are present in the book’s pages. \u201cEr\u00e1rio mineral<\/em> is no exception to the rule: when it comes to healing, anything goes,\u201d asserts Ronaldo Sim\u00f5es Coelho in a text published with the Fiocruz\/Fapemig-sponsored version of the barber-surgeon’s book, where Coelho reminds us that this has always been the attitude of those devoted to medicine.<\/p>\n

In the 18th<\/sup> century, book writing was not common among barber- surgeons, whose knowledge was based on medical practice. Theorizing and writing about healing was a task left to physicians who had received a theoretical, scholastic education, still modeled on Greek medicine and the theory of humorism. Nor was it a prerogative of barber-surgeons to prescribe medications and\/or formulate them, like an apothecary. Yet Gomes Ferreira, who owned an apothecary shop, did all that in the hinterlands of Minas Gerais.<\/p>\n

The first edition of Er\u00e1rio mineral<\/em>, published in the first half of the 18th<\/sup> century, is freely available on the Google Books website. Searching for the book’s title is all it takes to access the work in digital form. The 2002 edition \u2013 which, in addition to the original text, brings articles from scholars commenting on the book \u2013 can also be accessed on the Internet, more precisely through the Scielo website. J\u00fania Ferreira Furtado is planning to release a new edition of Er\u00e1rio mineral,<\/em> to which she will add 50 new pages written by Gomes Ferreira for a 1750s edition of the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book by a barber-surgeon describes the cures used in 18th century","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[241,247],"coauthors":[101],"class_list":["post-94328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect","tag-history","tag-medicine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94328"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=94328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}