Colonization, Health and Religion: The pioneer’s medicine and the symbolic power of the social moral in the National Agricultural Colony of Goiás (1941-1959)

Abstract

This article looks to identify the protestant medical practices and its influence in the constitution of the social space within the National Agricultural Colony of Goiás (CANG), created by the federal Government in 1941. During the end of the 1930s in Brazil, the federal government instituted a colonization policy of the interior part of the country, in a movement known as the “March to the West” (Marcha para o Oeste). This policy aimed to favor internal migration and territorial occupation of the Brazilian regions with low population density. The medical policies adopted by the National Agricultural Colony of Goiás (CANG) had as a characteristic element the predominance of protestant doctors, of who were initially supported by the English medical missionary doctor James Fanstone, director of the Hospital Evangélico Goiano em Anápolis. Therefore, besides the biographical focus of doctors who were also pioneers, this study aims to identify the influence that the pioneers´ medicine had, not only in the medical field, but also in the symbolic constitution of the CANG. As such, the study is based on emphasis of documents in the form of reports, memoirs, interviews and other document records that permit the identification of the forms in which were used to combat the tropical diseases in the hinterlands of Goiás during the first-half of the 20th century, along with the role that medical knowledge played as a social capital, constructed as a symbolic power known as the CANG. This study intends to present a relation between migration, colonization and medical practices in the West of Brazil, with its central element being the history of health and tropical medicine.

Keywords: Migration; Colonization; Symbolic Power; Goiás; History of Health.