The Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty, Poor Relief and Health Care in Early-Modern Portugal

By the end of the fifteenth century most European countries had witnessed a profound reformation of their poor relief and health care policies. As this book demonstrates, Portugal was among them and actively participated in such reforms. Providing the first English language monograph on this topic, Laurinda Abreu examines the Portuguese experience and places it within the broader European context. She shows that, in line with much that was happening throughout the rest of Europe, Portugal had not only set up a systematic reform of the hospitals but had also developed new formal arrangements for charitable and welfare provision that responded to the changing socioeconomic framework, the nature of poverty and the concerns of political powers. The defining element of the Portuguese experience was the dominant role played by a new lay confraternity, the confraternity of the Misericórdia, created under the auspices of King D. Manuel I in 1498. By the time of the king's death in 1521 there were more than 70 Misericórdias in Portugal and its empire, and by 1640, more than 300. All of them were run according to a unified set of rules and principles with identical social objectives. Based upon a wealth of primary source documentation, this book reveals how the sixteenth-century Portuguese crown succeeded in implementing a national poor relief and health care structure, with the support of the Papacy and local elites, and funded principally through pious donations. This process strengthened the authority of the royal government at a time which coincided with the emergence of the early modern state. In so doing, the book establishes poor relief and public health alongside military, diplomatic and administrative authorities, as the pillars of centralisation of royal power.

Social representations of nursing students about hospital assistance and primary health care

Objective: To analyze how social representations of hospital and community care are structured in two groups of nursing students – 1st and 4th years. Method: Qualitative research oriented by the Theory of Social Representations. We used a questionnaire with Free Association of Words. Data were analyzed in the Software IRaMuTeQ 0.6 alpha 3. Results: We applied the method of Descending Hierarchical Classifi cation and obtained four classes. Class 4 has the largest social representation (30.41%) within the corpus. The two organizational axes are nurse and disease/patient in the central core. On the periphery are the care and help related to the nurse and the treatment and prevention associated with the disease. Conclusion: Social representations focus on disease/patient and on the role of nurses in the treatment, prevention, and care. Health promotion and the social determinants of health are absent from the social representations of students.