Celebrated as a major work since its original publication, The Sanitation of Brazil traces how rural health and sanitation policies influenced the formation of Brazil's national public health system. Gilberto Hochman's pioneering study examines the ideological, social and political forces that approached questions of health and government action. The era from 1910 to 1930 offered unique opportunities for public health reform, and Hochman examines its successes and failures. He looks at how health became a state concern, tying the emergence of public health policies to a nationalistic movement and to a convergence of the elites' social consciousness with their political and material interests. Politicians weighed the costs and benefits of state-run public health versus the burdens imposed by disease. Physicians and intellectuals, meanwhile, swayed them with warnings that endemic disease and official neglect might affect everyone--rich and poor, rural and urban, interior and coastal--if left unchecked. The book shows how disease and health were and are associated with nation-state building in Brazil.

"We are very fortunate to have this lucid translation of Gilberto Hochman's brilliant study of the expansion of public health in early twentieth century Brazil, a complex process that involved ideological and pragmatic calculations of regional autonomy, centralized authority, and the high human cost of disease across a vast and varied country. This history elucidates the foundations of Brazil's extensive modern health system and offers a model for political analysis of the state and health."--Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America

"Finally, Gilberto Hochman's classic account of public health policy, citizenship, and state-building during Brazil's First Republic is available beyond the Portuguese-reading world. This prize-winning volume offers a crucial historical perspective on the complex politics of constructing collective health, all the more resonant today as Brazil's admired national health system is under assault."--Anne-Emanuelle Birn, co-editor of Comrades in Health: US Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home