Maus ares e malária: entre os pântanos de Natal e o feroz mosquito africano (1892-1932)

The development of epidemiological practices in the last years of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was characterized by both an influence of medical geography and the emergence of microbes and vectors of diseases. Both theories were used to explain outbreaks in Rio Grande do Norte specially in Natal. In this process were organized new institutions linked to public health, unhealthy spaces and prescribed hygiene measures. The redefinitions of the spaces were linked to updated elements of Hippocratic medicine such as aerism and emphasis on medical topography. How the physicians of the town were organized in the face of new meanings and fields of expertise in the demarcation of diseases and regulation of their own practices against the illegal medical practitioners? Likewise, the very occurrence of epidemics mobilized people, urban institutions and apparatuses. But how the Hippocratic legacy that leads to the idea of bad air originated by swamps from the eighteenth and nineteenth century has been linked to new microbial assumptions and disease vectors in the early twentieth century? How an invader from Africa, (the mosquito A. gambiae) mobilized transnational efforts to combat malaria and redefined the epidemiological practices? The aim of this work is to understand how epidemiological practices redefine the way we define spaces, practices and disease from both an approach influenced by a relational history of spaces and a theoretical synergy which includes topics in Science Studies, Post Structuralist Geography and some elements of Feminist Studies. Documentary research were surveyed in the reports of the provincial presidents, government posts to the Provincial Assembly, specialized medical articles and theses, and documents from the Rockefeller Foundation and national and international journals. In this regard shall be given to both material and discursive aspects of space-related practical epidemiological that Natal as much (in general) Rio Grande do Norte between bad air and malaria.