Title biographical look about cultural medicine of the 19th / 20th century in Portugal and Brazil

Abstract

This work intends to observe some biographies of female doctors who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries in Portugal and Brazil - whom we will henceforth call "médicas-cultural" - considering their relationship with culture, professional standard, social, gender and racial contingencies of their time. With regard to the spatio-temporal considered frame, it should be noted that the few female physicians we select for this paper were based on the first licensed students in Medicine, both in Bahia and Sergipe, other Brazilian states or even in foreign countries. To start with we realized the emergence of very high reliable leading figures in Medicine as well as in other areas of knowledge, a surprising group of "cultural-women" with fantastic productions in the several Humanities areas, pointing out the Literature, Arts, Politics, Culture, Religion and Social Sciences. On the basis of this study is the project "Doctors and Culture: a critical study and general guide to the archives of medical writers, also being artists and thinkers from Portugal and Bahia, Brazil".  Started in 2006 and still under development, now it's our purpose to approach the existence of male and female physicians that seek for motivations to develop other intellectual activities in parallel or simultaneously with their professional ones. However, it must be recognized that only from 2006 onwards the interest on this topic arose, researched in the context of Portugal and Bahia frames, according to the Information Science rules (CI), a remarkable multidisciplinary area focusing the treatment and management of information and knowledge. In fact, as soon as we started this early research, we could notice the existence of very few written works about "médicas-cultural" in the field of social representatives of the intellectuality.