Marriage and prophylaxis: the family under the gaze of evolutionism in the First Republic

Abstract

This article analyses the intersection between medical-legal knowledge and civil law in Brazil during the First Republic (1889–1930), focusing on the appropriation of the former by the latter, based on discussions about the regulation of marriage and the family. The text explores how medical knowledge was mobilised in the transition to modernity to provide scientific support for civil law, reflecting tensions between different projects of modernity. The process of appropriation of these ideas, however, is neither linear nor uniform, so we highlight how it occurred in different ways in different parts of the Brazilian legal field. On the one hand, there was the heterodox appropriation of evolutionary ideas by intellectuals linked to the Recife School; on the other, the defence of the auxiliary use of legal medicine as unquestionable expert knowledge on civil relations. This tension is evident in the debates on divorce, paternity, and the legal status of women and illegitimate children that emerged during the passage of the 1916 Civil Code, revealing the persistence of traces of religious culture within legal culture. Based on sources from law school journals in Recife, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, this article argues that one of the effects of this interaction was the centralisation of marriage in the institutional order of republican Brazil as an instrument for preventing social disorder. This process ultimately reinforced hierarchies of race, class, and gender, leaving an ambiguous legacy that still echoes in contemporary Brazilian society.