Carta dos Editores Convidados

Abstract

The purpose of the event, attended by Brazilian and European researchers, was a historical discussion of health assistance from the perspectives of charity, philanthropy, and the state. The articles published in these pages are an invitation for you, as readers, to reflect on policy, assistance, and health through some particular prisms: the relation between healthcare services and hospital architecture, the cultural dynamics involved in birthing and midwife practices and values, the development of healthcare provider identities, public policy making in regards to maternity, and the social ties between philanthropy and aid to the poor and between philanthropy and public health in the face of contagious diseases. The issue opens with an article by Ana Paula Vosne Martins, where the author problematizes concepts recently incorporated into research in the human and social sciences, concerning the topics of assistance, benevolence and care. Articles by Ana Teresa Venancio, Renato Gama-Rosa Costa, and Márcia Rocha Monteiro address the question of health assistance and hospital architecture. In her study of the creation of the Juliano Moreira Colony, inaugurated in 1924 in Rio de Janeiro, Venancio discusses the significance of adopting hospital colonies as the institutional model in public policy on psychiatric assistance during the first half of the twentieth century. Renato Gama-Rosa reviews studies on hospital architecture as related to health assistance, featuring some examples of hospitals and sanitariums and underscoring the link between architectural paradigms and established medical knowledge. Márcia Rocha Monteiro calls attention to another aspect of health assistance: company-built hospitals in Brazil during the Vargas era. Founded in 1941 to lend support to the sugarcane economy, one of the tasks of the Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool (IAA; Sugar and Alcohol Institute) was to provide assistance to cane workers, and to that end the IAA built hospitals in Brazil's main sugarcane regions. Monteiro analyzes the singular features of this hospital architecture, rooted in the institute's social welfare policy. The second line of discussions focuses on birth, midwives, and assistance. This includes an article by Tânia Maria de Almeida Silva and Luiz Otávio Ferreira on the health education of folk midwives by Brazil'