Infancy and death in the coal-mining region: medical-sanitary discourses about infant mortality rate in southern Santa Catarina

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze medical-sanitary discourses about infant mortality in the coal-mining region of Santa Catarina. Since the beginning of the republican period infancy and motherhood gradually occupied a highlighted space among the discourses of bureaucrats, physicians, philanthropists and businessmen, who saw in a healthy childhood the possibility to transform the nation into an industrial and military potency. Similar to the rest of the country, in the coal-mining region of Santa Catarina, in its full process of economic modernization between the decades of 1940 and 1960, children's health was the target to an important intervention process which aimed at cataloging the causes of the high rates of infant mortality in the region, thus making the working and poor families subjects to countless normative discourses that held them accountable for the medical-sanitary situation, turning the mothers in to the main culprits for the deaths that ravaged the puerile population.