Evidence of Medicalization in Medical Discourse From the Inaugural Theses About School Hygiene in Brazil During the First Republic

Abstract

This chapter discusses the signs of medicalization present in the inaugural theses on school hygiene in the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia during a portion of the ninetieth and twentieth centuries (1889–1930). The idea was to form a better understanding of the historical development of social practices aimed at children, particularly those practices related to scholarly health, leading to what we today refer to as the medicalization of problems in the schooling process. Seven inaugural theses on the subject of school hygiene were selected. Information was organized into themes related to childhood, school hygiene, education, and signs of medicalization; later, these themes were submitted for content analysis. It was assumed that the medical discourse expressed in the prescriptions regarding child care and upbringing revealed the signs of medicalization that those professionals endorsed at the time. The results show that signs of medicalization arose in 1905 related to the meanings of “student” and “education.” There was a classification of students into the categories of “normal” or “abnormal”; there also occurred a process by which “normal” students were selected for education in regular schools. Moreover, from 1921 on, it was considered necessary to apply medical knowledge to explain students’ behaviors—the source of which might have been a disease hidden in the body. These results confirm that the medicalization of problems in the schooling process had its origins among the first encounters between medical knowledge and education and clearly indicates a change in focus from the institution to the individual, which characterizes medicalization today.