The dangers of wet nurses to the nation in the work of Emílio Joaquim da Silva Maia (1834-1859)

Abstract

Having as main object the medical essay of Silva Maia contrary to the habit of adopting slave wet nurses for the creation and breastfeeding of children of the Brazilian elites, this article sought to demonstrate critically how the medical hygiene defended by the author has affinities with the hegemonic power of his time. Possessing a possible racialist theory, this factor, as well as other arguments from his medical rhetoric, which sought to affirm the obligations of white women to the upbringing of children, were the main elements in which we were able to point out the positive relations between the author’s ideas and the social order of his time. Inserted in a reality heavily marked by racial and patriarchal values, the speech of Dr. Silva Maia held at the Medical Society of Rio de Janeiro, indirectly and unconsciously, may also represent the advance of the state under the brazilians elites, while, for Mattos (1987), the Conservative Regress (1836-1852), seeking to preserve the social order, threatened at the ends of the Regency and beginning of the Second Reign, sought to direct the population in a political, moral and intellectual way through several resources.