O Hospital-Colônia Antônio Aleixo e a ideologia de combate à lepra no Amazonas: desintegração familiar e educação higienista

Abstract

The research on screen presents the results of the master's research on compulsory isolation used as a public health policy to combat leprosy, and the historical, social and educational dimensions experienced by the subjects to whom it was directed. The study's general objective is to highlight the life stories of people affected by leprosy, who were compulsorily isolated at the Antônio Aleixo Colony Hospital in the mid-20th century, during the Vargas Era, as a sanitary measure to combat the disease in Amazonas. The study problematizes: How the life stories of people who underwent institutionalization at the Hospital-Colônia Antônio Aleixo – AM, reveal the political, economic and sanitary project of modernization in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century that guided compulsory isolation, as a result of leprosy? To achieve the general objective and answer the research problem, we systematized three specific objectives, namely: a) unveiling the discourses that supported the proposal for compulsory isolation, put into practice through policies to combat leprosy in Amazonas; b) analyze the educational dimensions offered to inmates of Brazilian Colonies and Preventories, based on the survey and categorization of theses and dissertations in the CAPES repository; c) know and record the marks left by compulsory isolation in the lives of people affected by leprosy, through the reporting of the memories of their deponents, highlighting the perception of people who went through the institutionalization process, from the discovery of the disease to their arrival and life in Colônia Antônio Aleixo. The epistemological and theoretical alignment of the research is the Historical-Dialetic Materialism method, which allows us to understand the relationship between the capitalist economic system, focusing on the constitution of the State and the use of its regulatory apparatuses for class conflict, among them, the Public Policies that implemented the compulsory isolation of people affected by leprosy. The methodological approach used is bibliographical, documentary research and strategically field research using the semi-structured thematic interview technique. We conclude that the places designated for the segregation of leprosy patients predate public health and the modern State, but compulsory isolation was legitimized in Brazil during the Vargas government. Meanwhile, the relationship between the capitalist economic system and Public Policies took place in the context of the compulsory isolation of those affected by leprosy, transforming these places into spaces of social exclusion, resulting from the reproduction of the organizational logic of a positivist and hygienist State which delegated to education the task of cooperating in the sanitization of the country. This action was aligned with the sanitary health model, based on the eugenicist pseudoscientific bias, used to separate from modern society anyone who was considered a social danger and in that context, lepers comprised this category, which is why it triggered the institutionalization of segregation of those individuals, resulting in a phenomenon that resulted in the perpetuation of social stigma in the imagination of the disease, the compulsory isolation of healthy children and, above all, family disintegration.