A history of care practices at Sanatório São Julião (1941 – 1986): between health and assistance

Abstract

This article describes and analyzes the relationship between assistance, health care, and benevolence to patients hospitalized with leprosy at Sanatório São Julião, between 1941 and 1986. This is a historiographic study that analyzed primary textual and oral sources based on contributions from Document Analysis and Oral History. The results indicate, in general, that two scenarios stood out, on the one hand, by the care of the healthy population, keeping those people hospitalized in the absence of treatment, on the other hand, by the control of the bodies of the inmates that appeared at times as a practice of health care of patient’s bodies, sometimes by the production social assistance practices. Hence, one notes the relationship of those practices can be understood as strategies for scanning the healthy and unhealthy population, to mark the places where they circulate and who could circulate; therefore, they were not exactly a cure for illness, in themselves.