A Space for Science, Simon Schwartzman, 1991, chapter 3

A Space for Science - The Development of the Scientific Community in Brazil

Simon Schwartzman

The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991

Chapter 3

IMPERIAL SCIENCE

Imperial Science

Colonial Science: The Naturalists

Imperial Science: The Nineteenth Century

Higher Education

Engineering and Mines

Medicine and Surgery

Imperial Science in Perspective

Notes

The arrival of political independence in Brazil was mostly smooth and peaceful, thanks to the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 under British protection during the Napoleonic wars. For about twenty years, Rio de Janeiro remained the seat of the Portuguese Empire, and attempts to bring the country back to colonial status in 1822 led to its formal independence under the heir of the Portuguese crown, Pedro I. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw relative economic stagnation, with the exhaustion of the gold mines in Minas Gerais. The expansion of international trade brought some new life to the sugar plantations in the Northeast, but nothing compared with their apogee in the past centuries. Cotton also flourished in the same region but could never compete with the plantations in the southern United States.⁽¹⁾

As the external and more dynamic sectors of the economy shrank, Brazilian life retreated to self-reliance and isolation in the old farms and dormant villages linked only by the slow pace of mule troops, while an unstable political elite worked to consolidate position in Rio de Janeiro Conflicts between Brazilian elites (mostly regional) and Portuguese elites flared from the beginning, and in 1830 Pedro 1 abdicated and went to Portugal, where he would be crowned later as Pedro IV. From 1830 to 1840 the country was governed by a succession of regents who ruled in behalf of his son, who was crowned Pedro II in 1840 at the age of fifteen. Pedro II was to remain in power until the beginning of the Republic in 1889. In the regency period a series of regional upheavals threatened to destroy the country's political integration.

The second half of the nineteenth century brought a contrasting period of political consolidation and increasing economic and demographic expansion. For almost fifty years Brazil functioned as a stable parliamentary monarchy, based on limited suffrage and a two-party system in which parties alternated in government under the benevolent supervision of the emperor, who embodied a poder moderador (moderating power) in addition to the usual three. The country's provinces, a legacy of old colonial administrative divisions, were governed by envoys from Rio de Janeiro who never remained in their posts long enough to create local links and loyalties, and parliamentary elections were routinely manipulated by the center to ensure their loyalty to the ruling party.

Economic expansion was due mostly to the growth of coffee as an important commodity in the international market. Coffee became an important crop in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century, and boomed due to the availability of cheap land and slave labor. As the land became exhausted, the coffee plantations moved to the South, and at the end of the century São Paulo had replaced the other provinces as the main producing region. This change in geography coincided with a growing scarcity of labor. In 1850 Brazil finally yielded to British pressure and ended the African slave trade. As the slave population dwindled, immigration from Europe and Asia and the substitution of slave work for salaried work emerged as the natural solutions to the crisis.⁽²⁾

Demographic and social changes can be explained only partially by these changes in the economy. The occupation of Brazilian territory since the sixteenth century proceeded for a variety of reasons, from military concerns to the presence of Indian populations amenable to enslavement and religious conversion, from the presence of extractive products to the availability of safe harbors and easy routes to the interior. Brazil was ruled from Salvador, Bahia, until the middle of the eighteenth century, and for most of the colonial period an independent administration also ruled the northern part of the country from the cities of São Luis in Maranhão and Belém at the mouth of the Amazon. Recife had also been the seat of the Dutch colonial adventure in South America, and it long remained the natural outlet and entrepot for the sugar economy in the Brazilian Northeast. The Portuguese and Spanish empires met and fought for their limits around the Rio de la Plata, and the province of Rio Grande do Sul, with its tradition of military mobilization and insurrections, was in part a product of this conflict. São Paulo was a door to the countryside, a source of Indian slaves and an early seat of Jesuit missions. The discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century concentrated the country's population in that province, which remained as a peculiar kind of urban/rural society based on slave labor that survived the gold rush a long time. More generally, each administrative or economic cycle left its trace of urban settlements, associated institutions, and population, which led to a complex and urbanized society that coexisted, sometimes with weak or almost no integration, with the plantation economy.⁽³⁾

This brief outline should be enough to suggest that science and technology could hardly be expected to emerge in Brazil from the requirements of colonial or post colonial economic conditions. What we see, instead, are the repeated attempts of the Portuguese and later Brazilian authorities to start some kind of practically minded institutions, followed shortly by their decay or transformation into some kind of unexpected research or general education body. This unexpected and unplanned change should be understood in terms of the modern culture that was beginning to develop in the country's capital in part because of the intellectual Europeanization of some sectors of the Brazilian elite and in part because of a growing number of Europeans - not only from Portugal but also from France, Germany, and other countries - who were attracted by the opportunities of employment or adventure they hoped Brazil could offer.

Colonial Science: The Naturalists

Unlike such nations as France, Holland, and England, which transferred some kind of "colonial science" to the territories and nations they occupied, Portugal did not develop its own scientific tradition and therefore could not be expected to take this course.⁽⁴⁾ Portuguese colonialism was exploitative and predatory, with no intention of creating in the New World a complex society boasting institutions for producing and transmitting knowledge.⁽⁵⁾ Some forms of technology were developed for gold mining and sugar production-the main economic activities during Brazil's four centuries of colonial occupation - and little else.⁽⁶⁾

Brazil was not completely isolated from the rest of the world, however. Throughout the sixteenth century Portugal disputed its possession of the Brazilian territory with other European sea powers, and from 1630 to 1661 Holland controlled the most profitable region of Brazil, the Northeast, from the city of Recife.⁽⁷⁾ The Dutch administration brought with it individuals dedicated to the study of Brazil's geography, zoology, and botany and left behind an important collection of drawings that is only now being rediscovered. Scientific activities undertaken in Brazil until independence were to focus on descriptions of nature within the New World: its fauna, flora, minerals, and inhabitants. It was descriptive science, undertaken largely by foreign travelers, who added to the observations on natural history then being accumulated in Europe.

The Portuguese crown's interest in Brazil's raw materials led to some efforts to collect information about new products of possible commercial value. Brazilian scientific and educational institutions up to the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be compared with those in Spanish America. Education, under the direction of the Jesuits, never exceeded the equivalent of today's secondary school. Leery of the idea of Brazilian institutes that might rival those in Portugal, the crown hindered the Jesuits from establishing their proposed university and prevented the creation of any kind of press that might have contributed to the dissemination of new ideas.

With Pombal's rise in Portugal, the colonial scene underwent substantial changes. In 1783 the Portuguese government entrusted Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, the first Brazilian naturalist to have studied at Coimbra, with the responsibility of exploring the colony's flora and fauna. An important contribution to Brazilian botany and zoology, the results of Ferreira's studies were all lost for Portugal during the invasion of Portugal by Napoleon's troops, when the holdings of the Real Museu were taken to Paris by Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire.

In 1772, under the viceroyalty of the Marquis of Lavradio, a Sociedade Científica was founded in Rio de Janeiro for the purpose of disseminating scientific knowledge. The society sponsored public conferences and dealt with a range of subjects: botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, and mineralogy. The Marquis de Lavradio also created a small botanical garden for plant experimentation. In 1779 the society's name was changed to Sociedade Literária do Rio de Janeiro. Its work continued until 1794, when it was closed - probably for minor political reasons.⁽⁸⁾ In 1797 the first official research institution was finally installed in Brazil, when the Portuguese king ordered the captain general of Pará to set up a botanical garden for the acclimatization of plants in the city of Belém.⁽⁹⁾

Imperial Science: The Nineteenth Century

It was only in the nineteenth century, following the transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil, that some technical institutes and more systematic research activities began to appear. For geologist Othon Leonardos, Brazilian science had its real start with the brothers Martin Francisco and José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, who traveled to rural São Paulo in 1819 to study its geology and mineralogy and then to apply this knowledge to mining activities. Several institutions had been created already in 1808: the Academia de Guardas-Marinha in Rio de Janeiro, later to⁽¹⁰⁾ become the Naval Academy; Bahia's Colégio Médico-Cirúrgico and Rio de Janeiro's Escola Médico-Cirúrgica, which developed into the country's first two schools of medicine; the Biblioteca Nacional, Brazil's national library; Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Botânico, originally known as the Real Horto; and the Escola Central, a military academy that was to become the country's first engineering school.

The pragmatic intent of these early institutions and how they drifted away from it are clear in the examples of the Jardim Botânico and the Museu Imperial.⁽¹¹⁾ The Jardim Botânico had its origin in the establishment of a gunpowder factory near the city's Rodrigo de Freitas lake. Parallel to the founding of this factory on 13 June 1808, the prince regent⁽¹²⁾ decreed that a lot be prepared near the plant inspector's lodgings where an acclimatization house for East Indian spices would be built. Besides growing East Indian spices, the garden was to be used to acclimatize and cultivate tea for the European market. In 1814 a group of Chinese colonists settled in the region and demonstrated how to pre pare the product. Although the crop did reasonably well, the original plan of supplying Europe was never implemented. The Jardim Botânico served simultaneously as the main site for developing and acclimatizing such plants as the nutmeg, avocado, clove, cinnamon trees, sugarcane, and other plants. Its example spread, and botanical gardens were set up one by one in Bahia, Minas Gerais. Pernambuco, São Paulo, and other places using plant seeds and seedlings originally sent to Rio from abroad. Later, King João expanded the Real Horto, opening it to the public and renaming it the Real Jardim Botânico Under the administration of Friar Leandro do Sacramento, the first professor of botany at the Escola Médico-Cirúrgica and the first director of the Jardim Botânico. After independence, the garden's initial role was significantly expanded. From a mere lot for the introduction and acclimatization of plants, it grew to an institute for serious experimentation and study. Besides initiating the cultivation of some plants, including tea, Friar Leandro's administration exchanged species with Cambridge's botanical gardens and distributed seeds and plants to gardens in Pará, Pernambuco, and Bahia. As the economic irrelevance of these products became obvious, the garden turned into a place for traditional studies in botanical taxonomy-and mostly a pleasant park and strolling ground for the population of Rio de Janeiro.

The Museu Real (later to be named Museu Imperial and later still Museu Nacional) started with a collection of mineral samples from the German mineralogist Abraham Werner which was then being used in practical classes at the Academia Militar art objects in wood, marble, silver, ivory, and coral; a collection of oil paintings donated by King João VI; native handicrafts and natural products dispensed among various Rio de Janeiro establishments; and stuffed animals from an old collection started at the time of the colony and known as the Casa dos Pássaros (Bird's House).⁽¹³⁾ In addition, many private donations were made. The original administration included a director, a janitor a zoological assistant, a clerk, and a bookkeeper A total of 2,880 mil réis, the equivalent of approximately 580 British pounds, was first budgeted for the purchase of material. The Museu Nacional developed slowly. It was some time before the organizing of public exhibits of its collections became an important or even permissible activity. Until 1821 only two rooms on the ground floor of the Campo de Santana building were opened to the public; there, a display of models of industrial machinery had been set up on the initiative of another institution, the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional. That year the museum's scientific collections were opened to visitation. After independence in 1822, the museum entered a new and fruitful period. The ministers of the Empire supported the museum by requesting that the foreign naturalists who came to Brazil donate collected material. The museum slowly expanded its collections with donations from Langsdorff, Natterer, Sellow, and others. It was then that a laboratory for physics and chemistry was set up, and the museum commenced systematic exchanges of collections, or samples of collections, with foreign institutions.

As the century progressed, the Museu Nacional developed into a scientific center where European naturalists would gather on their arrival in Brazil. Ludwig Riedel, who came to join the scientific expedition of G. I. Langsdorff⁽¹⁴⁾ in 1820, served as head of the botany section of the museum for some time, and Friedrich Sellow, who had also come to Brazil at Langsdorff's suggestion, spent time traveling on commission to the museum. Fritz Muller, whose Für Darwin is considered a contribution to evolutionist theory, was a traveling naturalist for the museum for many years. Other memorable names include Hermann von Ihering and Emil Göldi. Serving as traveling naturalist for the museum following his arrival from Germany, von Ihering became the founder and first director of São Paulo's Museu Paulista in 1894. Göldi joined the Museu Imperial as an aide in the zoological section and was later invited to organize the Museu do Pará, which now bears his name.

In 1876 the Comissão Geológica do Império (Imperial Geological Commission) provided the museum with a major geological collection organized by Charles F. Hartt. Gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, tin, and precious gems are also part of these collections, which contain samples from México, the United States, Russia, Austria, and other nations. As of 1850 the museum's well-equipped mineralogy laboratory broadened its analyses and experiments to include fuel samples. Foreign explorers were focusing on discovering deposits of coal, petroleum, copper, and other minerals,⁽¹⁵⁾ but the museum's role was to be reduced by the transfer of responsibility for the main geological and mineral activities to Brazil's geological services.

The museum reached its golden age in 1876 under Ladislau Neto:

There was enthusiasm in the air, a desire to build the museum's reputation and gain esteem in the eyes of the public and of the nation's government. Work was undertaken earnestly in laboratories and offices; collections were reexamined, and old or damaged specimens were substituted with more recent ones; cupboards were filled; scattered bones were brought together to form skeletons; hides were finally put to use; care was taken concerning the aesthetic appeal of collections on exhibit; labels replaced with new ones; and old generic denominations were substituted by their modern adaptations . . . Conferences held in the museum's salon at night attracted a distinguished and select group, which most often included the lively presence of Emperor Pedro II. On scheduled dates, teachers, deputies, senators, top civil servants, and ladies of high society all gathered there to hear a fascinating and useful lesson on any of various branches of natural science illustrated with drawings and prints, murals, and samples of the objects mentioned in the lecture. The topics of zoology, botany, and biology were all approached synthetically, and the lecturer would provide the audience with conclusions and a summary of facts that were easy to retain and assimilate. Papers from these conferences were published in the newspapers and in certain literary and scientific journals. Open to the public three days a week, the museum drew thousands of visitors a month eager to view the objects on exhibit ...Everywhere, the museum was spoken of fondly and praised. Travelers who stopped to see the capital of Brazil were anxious to see its collections.⁽¹⁶⁾

In 1880 the museum opened a laboratory of experimental physiology the first in the country - where João Batista de Lacerda and Louis Couty were to carry out their work. Couty had come to Brazil from France to teach industrial biology at the Escola Politécnica, but he turned to the museum as an adequate place for practical experimentation. The first studies involved animal poisons; toxic and nutritive plants; climate physiology; sugarcane alcohol, coffee, and mate; human and animal diseases; and cerebral physiology, using monkey subjects. All students of the development of biological science in Brazil stress the importance of Couty and Lacerda's laboratory as long as it lasted.⁽¹⁷⁾

By the beginning of the twentieth century the geology and mineralogy sections of the museum had accumulated a significant collection that included samples of nearly all minerals then exploited in Brazil. But this was already a period of institutional decadence. As the Republic brought new urgencies and priorities, it could not find a place for the old museum, which became mostly a lifeless collection of scientific curiosities for the eventual visitor.

The apogee of imperial science was marked by the active presence of Pedro II himself in all matters dealing with science, technology, and education. Playing the role of a Brazilian Maecenas, the emperor's attraction to the sciences led him to seek the company of scientists both within Brazil and abroad and to participate in all of Brazil's more significant cultural and scientific events.

The emperor's direct involvement with the sciences met with some resistance. Fernando de Azevedo interpreted this as a resistance to modernization, the "poorly disguised hostility felt within an intellectual and political environment that was dominated by individuals prone to rhetoric and educated in abstractions-an environment that led national thinking to absorb itself in literature, legal concerns and questions, and political debate."⁽¹⁸⁾ Besides considerations of this nature, the emperor's interest in scientific matters placed such activities at the mercy of imperial whims. Those who believed they were not getting a fair deal were perhaps in the best position to realize the dangers inherent in this situation. Such was the case of Joaquim Murtinho, a homeopathic physician who in his defense of homeopathic medicine spoke out sharply against Pedro II:

His royal highness suffers from what we might call scientific mania. His royal highness, with one single thesis in hand, wants this thesis to encompass medicine, mathematics, natural sciences, civil and mining engineering, philosophy history, language, ...and whatever else; his royal highness studies this thesis most seriously and, whenever a defendant mentions a certain point in their work, his royal highness leafs through the thesis as if he under stood the subject matter and was trying to formulate an opinion... Be it a scientific or industrial experiment, an attempt to guide a balloon, an experiment on electrical lighting-there is his majesty quoting the books he has read on the subject and voicing his opinion on the results of the experiment.

The emperor not only had opinions but also made decisions:

When there is a selective examination for candidate teachers in our schools, off go the candidates' exams to be read by his royal highness. And fortunate are those whose exams please his majesty. When it comes to hiring a foreign professor for a position at one of our universities, it is not the faculty that advises the government about the candidate with the best curriculum-it is his royal highness himself, or one of his scientific aides, who selects the appointee. Physiologists are sent to teach agriculture, and mining engineers are sent to teach the arts and manufacturing, ignoring professional callings, displacing individuals from their chosen areas, and transforming professors who are distinguished in their fields into mediocre teachers who must teach on subjects they are not familiar with simply because his royal highness chose to put them there. In all his acts, his royal highness seems to say: Science, is me.⁽¹⁹⁾

Higher Education

The authorities were involved not only in science but also in education. The distribution of new educational institutions in the Brazilian territory early in the nineteenth century tells us something about their purposes. The transfer of the Portuguese crown to Brazil was the lowest point in the history of the Portuguese Empire since the glorious years of the discoveries, and Brazil's military weakness explains the priority given the establishment of military schools in the capital, Rio de Janeiro. The second priority was medicine and surgery, both for military reasons and supposedly for the protection of health. After the capital, Bahia was Brazil's largest and most important city, and it was fitting that Bahia should be the seat of the second medical school. A law education was probably still seen as the best mobility channel for the children of the local gentry in decadent Recife and stagnant São Paulo, and they got the law schools they longed for.

If these were the motivations of those surrounding the exiled Portuguese king, the pattern did not remain unchanged or unquestioned in the years to follow. The military academies developed into engineering schools that did not excel as technical centers but that did provide fertile ground for the scientistic values of positivism; and the medical profession, stimulated by its newly discovered efficacy against tropical diseases at the turn of the century, also developed its own ambitions. The law schools, established in 1827 in São Paulo and Recife, moved away from the dominance of canonical law and the traditional Portuguese codes and received an influx of different strains of European liberal thinking.⁽²⁰⁾

The Empire's educational system was characterized chiefly by administrative centralization. According to the Royal Charter of Law of 4 December 1810, the Academia Real Militar was to be "headed by a military junta, composed of a president and four or more deputies, three of which were to be those whom, as more capable in scientific and military studies, I decide to select and appoint to said position."⁽²¹⁾ All the king's appointees in a 1811 decree were members of the Royal Engineering Corps.⁽²²⁾ Even after the introduction of a selective examination scheme for the Academy in 1833, politics continued to play a large part in the hiring of faculty. A 1837 report on the state of professional teaching in Brazil called attention to "the poor choice of some faculty members, appointed under scandalous favoritism. Instead of seeking out the most worthwhile candidates, with a few honorable exceptions an effort has been made to select only protégés. . . . Favoritism in selective examinations has been such that it is repulsive even to speak of it: sons follow fathers, brothers-in-law follow brothers-in-law, cousins follow cousins, nephews follow uncles . . . ⁽²³⁾ Without significant demand for qualified professionals and for a professional community that could and would impose some standards of quality, it was inevitable that centralization should have such negative effects. The result was that the Academy operated inadequately and presented many deficiencies: a lack of diligence by students and faculty, constant cheating on exams, and carelessness in the preparation of textbooks.

The very books the professors had to use in preparing textbooks were also prescribed by law. Centralization was also apparent in the direct subordination of the schools to the imperial cabinet. All institutions had to follow a mandatory seven-month school year, and "preparatory exams" before Provincial Committees of Public Teaching were established for candidates for higher educational institutes later in the century. These exams were based on subjects taught in secondary schools almost solely humanistic-and deprived schools of the right to choose students according to their own criteria.⁽²⁴⁾

Brazil was to witness a profound turnabout in its higher education system through the Leôncio de Carvalho reform, carried out in imperial times under the administration of Prime Minister Viscount of Sinimbu. This transformation was prompted by a vague awareness of the German university system mixed with positivist thinking and adapted to the political climate of decentralization that prevailed since the 1870 republican manifesto. Attendance was made optional and freedom of teaching was adopted with the introduction of a Brazilian version of German privatdozent and the elimination of government control over what was taught at the schools. According to contemporaries, the effects were disastrous. Whatever little quality control existed in the previous centralized regime immediately ceased to exist. A system of qualifying exams provided by the state at the end of the courses was introduced to compensate for the lack of controls, but its reliability depended too much on the capacity of each particular teacher.⁽²⁵⁾ The main result of this legislation, which was in effect until 1895, was the spread of institutions of higher education throughout Brazil, starting in São Paulo. The Leôncio de Carvalho reform left the impression that Brazil was not ready for academic freedom and pluralism, which reinforced the predominantly authoritarian and centralizing tendencies that were to prevail to the present.

With these limitations and lack of autonomy, the higher education institutions became the main centers from which the early Brazilian traditions of scientific work in the physical and biological sciences would be established.

Engineering and Mines

The first technical institution in Brazil was the Academia Real de Marinha (Royal Navy Academy), created by King João VI within Rio de Janeiro's São Bento Monastery. Two years later that same city gained its Academia Real Militar (Royal Military Academy), which was responsible for training officials in artillery and in geographical and topographical engineering. Enacted on 4 December 1810, the military academy's Charter of Law stated that instruction was to consist of "a complete course in the mathematical sciences, in the sciences of observation - that is, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, and natural history, including the vegetable and animal kingdoms-as well as all military sciences, including both tactics as well as construction of forts and artillery."⁽²⁶⁾ In 1832 the two academies were joined to form the Academia Militar e de Marinha, but that union did not last more than a year. The Academia Militar's complete course was seven years long and divided between mathematics (four years) and military teaching (three years). The teaching of mathematics followed these lines:

The first-year lecturer taught arithmetic, algebra (up through third- and fourth-degree equations), geometry, linear trigonometry, and some basics of spherical trigonometry; the second-year lecturer taught advanced algebra, analytical geometry, and differential and integral calculus; the third-year lecturer taught mechanics (static and dynamic), hydrostatics, and hydrodynamics; and in the fourth year there was a lecturer on spherical trigonometry, optics, astronomy, and geodesics.⁽²⁷⁾

This program was structured so that its concepts would be rigidly applied and leave no room for doubt or experimentation.⁽²⁸⁾

All further reforms within the Academia Real Militar either dealt with questions of a disciplinary nature or sought to improve the purely professional aspects of its courses. Later, civilian and military engineering began to move apart from each other. Beginning in 1833, civilians were allowed to attend courses with members of the military. In 1839 the academy became the Escola Militar and soon earned a reputation for maintaining extremely strict discipline and therefore no longer attracted the interest of civilians. But in 1842 a seven-year engineering course for civilians was introduced, and it became possible to obtain a doctoral degree through presentation of a thesis. An Escola de Aplicação (Practical School) was instituted in 1855 to make independent the teaching of military subjects, and in 1858 the Escola Militar was renamed the Escola Central as a predominantly civilian institution. Members of the military continued to attend, taking classes common to both courses. Physics was taught as a separate subject as of 1858.⁽²⁹⁾

In 1874, under the cabinet of Visconde do Rio Branco, Brazil's higher education system was thoroughly reformed, and the civil and military engineering courses were effectively separated. This resulted in the creation of Rio de Janeiro's Escola Politécnica along the French model. At this time the imperial regime was in full bloom, population was expanding, coffee was providing new revenues for the landed gentry and new taxes for the central government, contacts with Europe were intensified, and the old educational institutions became too narrow for the sons of an expanded elite. In the new Politécnica the old course of mathematics at the military school was divided into one course of physical and mathematical sciences and another of physical and natural sciences. Within physical and mathematical sciences classes were offered in "celestial mechanics and mathematical physics" and "supplementary mathematics." Also, in an important and unprecedented change, degrees could be attained as bachelor or doctor of physical and mathematical sciences or of physical and natural sciences outside the professional engineering courses. Science was thus introduced in the school, leading to the high expectations Rio Branco held about the Escola Politécnica; in a 1876 report he described the new curriculum as embodying "the culmination of advances attained by natural and physical-mathematical sciences."⁽³⁰⁾

This was too optimistic. Neither the spirit nor the structure of these courses remained during the republican period, after 1889. The first attempt to do away with these courses came in 1890 under the provisional government, soon after the fall of the Empire in 1889. The faculty at the Escola Politécnica spoke out against the proposed reform, so the head of the provisional government decided against carrying it out. The Politécnica's scientific courses survived until 1896, when they were finally abolished by the school's own faculty.⁽³¹⁾

Ouro Preto's Escola de Minas stands as a remarkable exception among the professional schools that came into existence following Rio Branco's educational reform. Created in 1875 by the personal initiative of the emperor, the Escola came to life under Claude Henri Gorceix, its organizer and first director.⁽³²⁾ During a visit to Europe at the beginning of the 1870s, Brazilian Emperor Pedro II invited Auguste Daubrée, director of the Paris École de Mines, to organize and head a Brazilian counterpart; instead, Daubrée suggested Henri Gorceix for the post. In July 1875, one year after his arrival in Brazil, Gorceix presented the government with a report suggesting the future location and the bylaws for the Escola de Minas It was to be built in the colonial town of Ouro Preto, seat of the Minas Gerais province, close to the country's richest mineral deposits. He demanded that it be a two-year course, with classes running for a ten-month period from August through June, the remaining two months being dedicated to excursions and practical work. The course would be full-time for both professors and students, with the former receiving good salaries and the poorer students receiving free classes and scholarships. A maximum of ten students per class would be allowed, and those who performed best would be awarded free trips to the United States and Europe for further improvement. An entrance exam would determine admittance independently from official Committees for Public Teaching, which controlled the access to other higher education institutions in the country, and exams would be frequent during the course itself. Last, the government would single out and make use of those who performed best during training trips abroad. Enacted on 6 November 1875, after a few changes regarding expenditures, this initial project met with Daubrée's full approval.

The final project of the Escola de Minas was inspired not by the famous Paris school but by Saint-Etienne's. The nature of teaching at the former was more general and attracted the best graduates of the École Politechnique to its three-year course; Saint-Etienne's two-year course was more practical and operational, although it did seek to provide better education than what would be required for simple technicians or master craftsmen. The Ouro Preto school was to be an École de mineurs, not an École de mines in the Paris tradition.

From its beginnings the history of the Escola de Minas was marked by a continual struggle against the imperial cabinet's centralizing tendencies and by constant clashes with Rio de Janeiro's Politécnica over its status, autonomy, and goals. A 1880 decree determined that graduates of the Escola de Minas should receive equal treatment when competing for teaching positions at similar schools. In 1885 the Ouro Preto course was granted the same status as the engineering course offered by the Politécnica. Despite this legal guarantee, however, Politécnica examining boards always managed to reject Ouro Preto graduates applying for professorships. On several occasions the personal intervention of the emperor was necessary. The lack of a specialized market for the school's graduates made it necessary to include civil engineering in the course, as recommended in 1884 by the president of the province of Minas Gerais, who offered his support to the school just as the central government's funds were becoming scarce. According to J. M. Carvalho, "the intervention of the province, which demanded changes in the initial project, most likely saved the school from extinction. But this intervention arose not from an interest in preserving an upper-level Escola de Minas but from a desire to preserve an upper-level school of any type in the Province of Minas."⁽³³⁾

Medicine and Surgery

The 1808 initiation of two medical-surgical courses, one in Salvador and the other in Rio de Janeiro marked the official inauguration of medical teaching in Brazil. Before that time, medical assistance in the colony was provided either by herbal curandeiros - inheritors of empirical, indigenous, or African knowledge-or by practitioners working under Portugal's Proto-Medicato. The Proto-Medicato was a permanent board that supervised all practices related to the art of healing; it also passed judgment on and submitted for official approval formal requests for authorization to practice these activities. To be so certified, the candidate needed to present a declaration attesting to a certain period of apprenticeship under another professional and to pass a brief exam before this medical board.⁽³⁴⁾

In 1808 the Portuguese crown created in Brazil the posts of Físico-Mór do Reino (physician general of the kingdom) and Cirurgião-Mór do Exército (surgeon general of the army), which became the highest sanitation authorities within Portugal's administrative organization. Together these two posts formed a kind of board of public health. The surgeon general and his delegates were to oversee everything related to teaching and to the practice of surgery, bleeding, birth, tooth-pulling, the application of leeches, and bone-setting. Besides their responsibility over military hospitals, doctors, and medical services, the physician general and his delegates were to oversee the teaching and practice of medicine; questions arising between doctors and patients; the practice of pharmacies, apothecaries, druggists, curandeiros, and surgeons dealing with internal illness. They would also be responsible for preventing epidemics and for supervising urban sanitation. The hierarchy between medicine, a liberal profession, and surgery, a practical skill, was obvious.

As the kingdom's new surgeon general, José Correia Picanço, a native of the state of Pernambuco and a graduate of Coimbra, suggested the creation of the Escola de Anatomia e Cirurgia (School of Anatomy and Surgery) in Bahia. The school was to operate in Bahia's Hospital Real "in benefit of the preservation and health of the citizens, with the purpose of training able and expert professors who, through the union of medical science and practical surgical knowledge, could be of service to residents of Brazil."⁽³⁵⁾ Rio de Janeiro's course was created a short time later, due to "a dire need for the court's military and marine hospitals to train their surgeons in the principles of medicine, as well as to treat the ailing aboard ships and the people who must reside in distant villages of the vast continent that is Brazil."⁽³⁶⁾ Four classes were offered during the four years of study: anatomy and physiology; surgical and private therapy; surgical and obstetrical medicine; and medicine, chemistry, medical topics, and pharmacy. Upon completion of studies, the student received a certificate and could then request that the surgeon general convene an examining board to judge the candidate's qualifications. After the graduate received a diploma, approval also would have to come from the Universidade de Coimbra. A 1811 reform, based on the Coimbra model, would require that, to be accepted, a candidate should have knowledge of Latin; rational and moral philosophy; geometry; and some elements of algebra, physics, and chemistry. 'This proposed curriculum was much broader than what is common today. The pharmacy course was to take three years; surgery and medicine, five years. It was never implemented.

In 1813 Rio de Janeiro's medical school was reorganized along much less ambitious lines and renamed the Academia Médico-Cirúrgica Now focused on surgery, the course program excluded pharmacy and medicine. To gain admittance, a candidate needed only to read and write Portuguese correctly and agree to learn French and English during the course itself. Students already knowledgeable in Latin or geometry were allowed to skip the first year altogether. After attending the academy for five years and having been approved in all final exams, a student got a Letter of Approval in Surgery. Those who continued their studies for another two years received a Letter of Graduate in Surgery, which guaranteed its holder various privileges: preferential placement for public job openings; permission to treat all diseases in places where there were no medical doctors; automatic membership in the Colégio Cirúrgico; and participation in the Academy of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro and in all similar institutions still to be established in Brazil. The degree of Doctor of Medicine would be bestowed on any graduating surgeon who presented a dissertation in Latin and successfully completed the exams indicated by the surgeon general. In 1815 the Bahia School was reorganized along the same lines. The structure of the schools of medicine was not changed because of Brazil's 1822 formal independence. Not until 1826 was the need for degree confirmation by the Universidade de Coimbra eliminated.

The 1829 founding of the Sociedade de Medicina (Medical Society) was a sign of its growing prestige and professionalization. The first nucleus of this society was a group of five distinguished physicians-two Brazilians and three foreign-plus two graduate surgeons. Organized according to the French Academy, its first task was to study the projects for the reform of medical teaching then under discussion by the Congress. Approved by the Congress after a few changes, and enacted on 3 October 1832, the project raised the status of the schools of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro to schools or colleges of medicine, authorizing them to grant diplomas of Doctor of Medicine, Pharmacy, or Midwifery (the diploma for "bleeder" was eliminated).

This reorganization of medical teaching was supposed to mark the passage from symptomatological and practical medicine to scientific medicine. The reformers criticized the old curriculum because it did not

offer one single course within the so-called auxiliary sciences dealing with the study of nature or of bodies and of the general and specific properties of each... Physics, chemistry, and botany these sciences are indispensable to the study of medicine; they provide us with innumerable documents that can be used either to explain phenomena of the organism or to examine the composition and action of bodies or to search for medicinal and mechanical means of protecting health and curing disease.⁽³⁷⁾

Besides including the three auxiliary sciences, this new course plan high lighted and expanded the teaching of hygiene, a field that was to be especially emphasized in Rio de Janeiro. Nonetheless, clinical practice remained the strong point at both schools.

An exception to this clinical tradition was the so-called Escola Tropicalista Bahiana, which was not a school in the formal sense but a movement that started around 1850 and developed outside Bahia's Escola de Medicina. Except for Otto Wücherer and John Ligertwood Paterson, who were educated abroad, all the members of the Tropicalista movement studied at the Escola de Medicina.

The Escola Tropicalista Bahiana made significant contributions. Wücherer and Paterson identified the yellow fever epidemic in 1849 and cholera morbus in 1853. In 1863 Wücherer published an essay on Brazilian fauna examining and describing new species of snakes and establishing morphological rules for the identification of poisonous varieties. He was also responsible for the correct identification and description of several diseases, including the hookworm infection, while Silva Lima described beriberi more precisely than ever before. The work of the Escola Tropicalista Bahiana is recorded in the Gazeta Médica da Bahia, which began publication in 1866.⁽³⁸⁾ Considered a very good journal for its time, it appeared regularly until 1908 and served as a vehicle for the dissemination of work by other members of the Tropicalista movement. Available literature does not shed much light on the possible nature of the relationship between the movement and the Escola de Medicina - whether it was one of collaboration or of rivalry - but it is difficult to imagine how one could ignore the other in nineteenth-century Salvador. It is likely that the model of teaching and research that was to permeate Brazilian science for another hundred years - that is, that the two should be carried out in separate locations - was already taking root.

Imperial Science in Perspective

Scientific activity until the beginning of the Brazilian Republic was extremely precarious. On the one hand, it had to deal with unstable initiatives undertaken at the emperor's fancy; on the other hand, it had to deal with the limitations of bureaucratic professional schools that had no autonomy and had completely utilitarian goals.

This precarious situation can be better understood if we remember that Brazil did not have significant social sectors that judged scientific activities worthwhile and important enough to warrant interest and investment. To gain a better perspective, one can contrast it to what was happening at more or less the same time in two non-Western countries of significant size, Japan and India.

Japan had been endeavoring systematically to absorb Western technology and science ever since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. By the year 1900, Tokyo's Imperial University was already offering advanced classes in physics, technology, and the biological sciences, all taught in Western languages. In addition, the Japanese students sent to study at the most important scientific centers in Europe and the United States were later to do the scientific teaching back in their homeland. In taking on this challenge, the Japanese government could rely on the support of a well-defined social group, the Samurai. When the period of feudal decentralization ended in Japan, this traditional warrior class abandoned its former activities and began supplying the individuals needed to accomplish Japan's scientific and technological revolution.⁽³⁹⁾

Although different in many aspects, India by the nineteenth century was also highly involved in Western culture. The English brought their teaching methods to the colony and encouraged the local elite to send their children to British universities. Indian society went through a process of Westernization that eventually led to the adoption of English as the colony's official language. India's cultural elite, the Brabman caste, moved into the new schools and universities hoping to maintain their social and cultural leadership within the limits permitted by their colonizers. Students of Indian history tend to stress how sterile this process of establishing a dynamic scientific and technological attitude that India could call its own was.⁽⁴⁰⁾

This look at nineteenth-century Japan and India underscores the meagerness of the educational and scientific projects being undertaken by the Brazilian Empire. Science was first perceived as applied knowledge, and as such it proved unpractical or uneconomical; later, it was perceived as culture and therefore mostly irrelevant. The gradual expansion of higher education throughout the nineteenth century was in part a quest for new and useful knowledge with a growing scientific content. It was also part of a movement from a limited but growing urban elite to open space and gather recognition in society through the strength of their special asset: the new knowledge they captured in Europe and were carrying to Brazil.⁽⁴¹⁾

The way the old Rio military school changed its names and goals during the nineteenth century is a good indication of its perceived roles. The military profession never enjoyed too much prestige in Brazil except at the southern frontier, and the civilian dimensions of the school always prevailed. In 1858 the Military Academy changed its name to Escola Central, and finally in 1874 it adopted the French denomination of Escola Politécnica That civilian engineering was dominant did not mean the school was particularly competent in development of mechanical or construction skills or in the stimulation of competence in the physical and natural sciences. Contemporary visitors were unanimous in criticizing the way teaching was conducted: with outdated textbooks, without practical or experimental classes, and almost totally without independent research work. This was probably just as well for the limited technological needs of Brazilian society at the time. The Escola de Minas de Ouro Preto did not fare much better in the long run, in spite of far stricter standards initially; Minas Gerais' soil was rich, but there would never be an economic basis for a mining industry that needed the skills the Escola de Minas was supposed to develop. Only in São Paulo, where the local Escola Politécnica was created in 1894 to follow closely the expansion of the railroad system into the coffee country, was a more technical and specialized education actually achieved.

What gave meaning to the Escola Politécnica in Rio de Janeiro (as well as to the Escola de Minas and to some extent the Politécnica in São Paulo) was mostly their role in the creation of a new breed of elite intellectuals who could challenge the established wisdom of priests and lawyers in the name of modern science. The notion that society could be planned and ruled by engineers, which was well within the French tradition, would have a large impact in Brazil. While in the British tradition engineering has always been a minor and ungentlemanly occupation, the École Politechnique was since its inception the place where the French elite was to be educated. There, military education came with the training of the mind in mathematics and physics, and it was believed that this combination would prepare the best of Cartesian minds to build bridges, run armies, and rule the economy. Positivist doctrine assured Brazilian engineers that they had the right and competence to rule society and make that society better and more civilized under their rule. They campaigned against the monarchy, for universal education, and for better salaries for the working class; they opposed the church and all forms of corporatist organization (universities, with their ambitions of self-regulation, were seen as one form), opposed mandatory smallpox inoculation, and above all organized themselves into secret societies and conspired to gain power. They were so successful that their slogan, Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress), is today still on the Brazilian flag.

A similar picture can be found in medicine. The notion that the medical sciences should move from their healing role to a more social, preventive one became well established in Brazilian medical circles in the nineteenth century.⁽⁴²⁾ Previously, doctors or healers dealt mostly with individuals who sought' their help and who could afford to pay for their services. Global epidemics-the plagues, leprosy, the pox, venereal diseases-were to be handled by government and religious authorities-isolating the carriers, comforting the dying, and exhorting the healthy not to live in promiscuity. Early in the century, probably for the first time in Brazil, doctors were asked to explain the causes of the illnesses of Rio de Janeiro as a city and to suggest cures. They found problems with the air, the architecture, the supply of foods to the population, and the social morality. Their recommendations were mostly urbanistic, legal, and moral instead of strictly medical, and they required the approval of higher authorities. In the following decades they would attempt to play a larger role.

In 1839 a dissertation entitled "Medicine Contributes to the Improvement of Morals and the Maintenance of Good Customs" had already spelled out this broad view in all its details. The medical profession, which knows people and the disturbances disorder creates in their bodies, should lead the organization of society, finding the causes of social Illnesses and interfering to redress them. The cure for society's illnesses was to be gained through the avoidance of passions and disorder. In this doctors' republic, order, calm light, and equilibrium would prevail. The role of medicine was to study the impact of government, freedom, slavery, and religious and other social institutions on the people, to identify the functional alterations they create, and to make the appropriate recommendations for equilibrium.⁽⁴³⁾ The Sociedade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro would work persistently to bring society under the scientific supervision of the medical profession while fighting all non established forms of medical work, from homeopathy to traditional medicine.

It is probably fair to say that the Brazilian medical profession never had the same power to put forward their ambitious propositions as the engineers. The market for medical private practice was always better than for engineers, and the doctors could adhere more closely, and earlier, to the canons of a liberal profession. Only doctors more related to general hospitals, sanitary medicine, and the military would attempt a broader role. Their greatest achievements came in the beginning of the twentieth century, when specialists in sanitary medicine joined with engineers to reorganize and sanitize the urban space, more specifically Rio de Janeiro. This was also the basis for Brazil's most important scientific Institution, the Instituto Manguinhos, which was born under a promise of social redemption that for a while seemed real. If doctors as an organized group never held too much power, they came much closer to the social sciences than the engineers, and they played an important role in shaping the country's dominant social ideologies. Physical anthropology appeared in Brazil as a branch of legal medicine. At the turn of the century, Nina Rodrigues, from the Bahia school of medicine, worked with biological theories seeking links between physical shape and criminal behavior. This literature led directly to questions about the racial characteristics of the Brazilian population, the problems of racial miscegenation, and degeneration.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Explanations for the troubles with Brazilians - laziness, luxury, lack of discipline - moved from the old environmental conceptions to the new biological and presumably more scientific theories.

Notes

1. For economic conditions in the period, see Simonsen 1962 and C. Prado Jr. 1967. On cotton, see Stein 1957.

2. See Balán 1973 and Graham 1973 for comparative views on European migration to Brazil.

3. See Martins Filho and Martins 1993.

4. McLeod 1975; Moyal 1976.

5. Godinho, 1961-70; Lang 1979; Maxwell 1972.

6. A. de B. Castro 1971.

7. Melo 1976; Boxer 1965 and 1973.

8. Azevedo 1985; Alexander Marchant 1961; Alden 1968.

9. Anyda Marchant 1961.

10. Leonardos 1955:271.

11. Another institution from those years was the Laboratório Químico-Prático (Laboratory of Practical Chemistry), established by João VI in 1812, which H. Rheinholdt considered the site of Brazil's first chemical-industrial operations. See Rheinholdt 1955:23-25.

12. The Portuguese court that fled to Brazil in 1808 was headed by Prince Regent João who was ruling in behalf of the deranged mother queen. He was later crowned as João VI

13. Portugal's utilitarian interest in Brazil was evident in the decree that created the Museu Real on 6 June 1808: "In the interest of propagating the knowledge and study of the natural sciences in the kingdom of Brazil,. which encompasses thousands of objects worthy of observation and examination and which may be useful to commerce, industry, and the arts (all of which I would like to bless with great fountains of wealth): I hereby determine that a royal museum be established in this court. to which place the instruments, machinery, and offices presently scattered in other locations shall be transferred as soon as possible, all under the responsibility of those whom I choose to appoint in the future. And being it of my knowledge that the dwelling places now occupied in the Campo de Santana by their owner João Rodrigues Pereira de Almeida are of adequate proportions and rooms for this purpose, and that the aforementioned owner has voluntarily agreed to sell this property for the sum of thirty-two contos in service to me, I have decided to accept this offer, proceeding with the transfer of deed through the Board of Finance so as to incorporate this property into the crown's possessions." (Quoted in Lacerda 1905:3-4.)

14. Langsdorff, of German descent, was designated as the Russian consul in Brazil. Between 1820 and 1827 he organized two expeditions through most of Brazil's interior, collecting a large quantity of botanical, zoological, and ethnographic materials that were sent to Saint Petersburg and are only recently being opened for study. See Chur, Komissarov & Licenko 1981.

15. Lacerda 1905:26-27.

16. Lacerda 1905:44-45.

17. L. de C. Faria 1951.

18. F. de Azevedo 1963:395.

19. Quoted in, Lobo 1964: vol 3

20. On the law schools in the nineteenth century see Venâncio Filho 1977 and Adorno 1999.

21. Quoted by F. M. de O. Castro 1955:50.

22. Antônio José do Amaral, first lieutenant, native of Rio de Janeiro, and first-year lecturer; Francisco Cordeiro da Silva e Alvim, master sergeant, native of Portugal, and second-year lecturer, later to become the Viscount of Jerumirim; José Saturnino da Costa Pereira, first lieutenant, native of Colônia do Sacramento, located in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, and third-year lecturer; Manuel Ferreira de Araujo Guimarães, captain, native of Bahia's capital city of São Salvador, and fourth year lecturer ; and José Vitorino dos Santos e Souza, second lieutenant, birthplace unknown, and lecturer of descriptive geometry (Morais 1955:118; F. M. de O. Castro 1955:52).

23. Clóvis Beviláqua, quoted in Almeida Jr.: 1956:21, 22.

24. J. M. Carvalho 1978.

25. Almeida Jr. 1956; Venâncio Filho 1977; Barros 1959.

26. Quoted in F. M. de O. Castro 1955:56. See also, on Rio de Janeiro's engineering tradition, Barata 1973.

27. F. M. de O. Castro 1955:51.

28. For instance, the second chapter of the mathematics charter reads: "The fourth year lecturer shall explain the full extent of Lagrange's spherical trigonometry. as well as the principles of optics. catoptric, and dioptrics: the basics of all types of spectacles refraction and reflection shall be presented. followed by an explanation of the system of the world, for which the works of Laplace shall be most helpful - not venturing into his noble theories, as time will not permit as much, but revealing the main results so elegantly demonstrated by Laplace, explaining all methods used in determining latitudes and longitudes at sea and on land; and regularly commenting and demonstrating how this may be applied to geodesic measures, once again to the fullest extent possible. The lecturer shall reveal also the basics of geographical maps. of various projections. and application to geographical maps and topographies. as well as explain the principles behind reduced maritime maps and the new methods used to draw up the map of France; also providing a general idea of global geography and its divisions. The works of Laplace, of Lacaille, and the Introduction of Lacroix and the geography of Pinkerton will serve as a basis for the textbook to be compiled and within which an effort must be made to cover the full extent of these topics." (quoted in Morais 1955:11 7).

29. F. M. de O. Castro 1955; Morais 1955: Ribeiro 1955; Almeida Jr. 1956.

30. F. M. de O. Castro 1955:61.

31. F. M. de O. Castro 1955:62.

32. For a full account, see J. M. Carvalho 1978.

33. J. M. Carvalho 1978:59.

34. The following account is based on Magalhães 1932; Campos 1941; Lobo 1964, 1: chap. 2; Santos Filho 1947 and 1977; and Lacaz 1977.

35. Quoted by Lobo 1964,1:13.

36. Lobo 1964, 1:13.

37. Quoted by Lobo 1964,1:50.

38. A facsimile reproduction in two volumes was published by Falcão (ed.) 1974.

39. Koizumi 1975; Hashimoto 1963.

40. Morehause 1971; Rahman 1970.

41. The following is based on Schwartzman 1991.

42. The following is based on Machado, Loureiro, Luz & Muricy 1978. An important source for the last part of the nineteenth century is the Anais do Academia Imperial de Medicina, published in Rio de Janeiro between 1870 and 1890 and later retitled Anais da Academia de Medicina.

43. Machado, Loureiro, Luz & Muricy 1978:197-98.

44. Stepan 1984.