Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: JONAS CLEVISON PEREIRA DE MELO JÚNIOR

To balance moods and control odors: body hygiene and material culture in nineteenth-century Recife.

Material culture; Body hygiene; Recife; XIX century.

Body hygiene in Brazil was not always an everyday practice, receiving special attention with the advent of hygienist medicine emerging throughout the 19th century. From the analysis of Material Culture related to practices of body hygiene and appearance care, recovered in excavations carried out at the Pilar Archaeological Site, in the Recife neighborhood, the association between the objects that compose it and the adoption process was noticed of these practices in everyday life in the city of Recife. This work sought to demonstrate the adoption of a new attitude towards public health problems, especially regarding bodies that fell ill, in the capital of the then province of Pernambuco, in a context of “material improvements” guided by the ideals of civilization and progress in vogue in Europe. Starting from a bibliographical survey on this topic, from the chrono-stylistic analysis of the Material Culture selected for study and from the crossing of information obtained in the analysis of these traces and from historical sources such as travelers' reports, periodicals, laws and medical manuals, it was observed the recurrence of traces associated with these practices at the Pilar Archaeological Site. The results allowed us to raise the hypothesis that, throughout the 19th century, sectors of Recife society adopted a Material Culture focused on body hygiene, linked to Hippocratic medicine, as a way of adhering to the assumptions established by an “ideology of hygiene” in force in that period.