In the Madalenas asylum
Study on venereal diseases and gender shows why prostitutes, accused of causing harm to men, were confined in sanatoriums

JOÃO MAURÍCIO DA ROSA

“It is often said that civilization and syphilization go together. Brazil, however, seems to have become syphilized before becoming civilized. Mass contamination of syphilis would occur in slave quarters, but not that black people were already infected. It was the masters of the mansions who contaminated the black women in the slave quarters. For a long time, the belief prevailed in Brazil that for a syphilitic person there is no better depurative than a virgin black girl.”
(Excerpt from Casa-Grande & Senzala, by Gilberto Freyre)

In the 19th century, syphilis was considered a venereal disease transmitted by prostitutes. Because of this, prostitution already led to police reports in some countries and even confinement. Between 1910 and 1940, the idea of ​​femininity that was dangerously uncontrolled and caused harm to men was reinforced. Women's sexual behavior was demonized, a prejudice that ended up interfering in urban space itself, due to government decisions to zone prostitutes.

However, anthropologist Sérgio Carrara, professor at the Institute of Social Medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), states that it was very difficult to interfere in men's behavior (due to the social prestige linked to their position in social and gender hierarchies). ) than in the lives of prostitutes. “Men have always been the main problem,” said the professor, during a conference held by the Population Studies Center (Nepo) at Unicamp. “Both sexes could spread the disease, but men were the privileged vector, as through them the disease passed from prostitutes to “family women”. The latter were never considered vectors, as they were always supposed to be chaste and pure,” he argues. “The problem is that, by acting on just one of the links in the chain (prostitutes), it would be much more difficult to control the endemic.”

Graduated from Unicamp and with a master's degree from the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, Carrara specialized in health anthropology, which investigates the relationship between doctors and patients with the disease from an anthropological point of view. In 1996 he published the book “Tribute to Venus: the fight against syphilis in Brazil, from the turn of the century (19th) to the 40s (20th century)”. His conference at Nepo was based on this work, which also earned him a doctorate at the National Museum.

“After all, someone contaminated the prostitutes. The disease continued to circulate in a population of men, women and children. The moralistic view of the period suggested that the prostitute transmitted syphilis to the man and he to his wife and children. The movement, which was circular, ended up being seen as unidirectional”, explains Carrara.

The blame was placed on prostitutes at a time when syphilis was not distinguished from blennorrhagia and other venereal diseases. Many doctors assumed that the diseases were the result of intense irritation of the mucous membranes, due to very intense and repetitive sexual activity. Hence the fact that prostitutes – and not women in general – are seen as producers and not just transmitters. “This, of course, occurred before the dissemination of bacterial theories. But in the West, the female body has always been seen as a source of danger and pollution”, he recalls.

Self control – Carrara developed his research on venereal diseases in Brazil with a view to obtaining a doctorate. Initially, the focus of the work was syphilis and, when interpreting the collected material, there was no concern with gender. “In the field of anthropology, I was more interested in discussing the person, their self-control, in knowing what control was possible over sexual behavior.”
But sex as a physiological need is a conception related to gender, as it is much more linked to men. “He has a need that needs to be regularly met, he has no control over the exercise of sexuality. Therefore, the researched material ended up marked by gender concepts, it is difficult to perceive any discussion that does not bear this mark”.

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Syphilis would affect up to the 7th generation of the victim

In the first four decades of the 20th century, all policies against venereal diseases
targeted females. The action was based on traditional conceptions of gender, with different expectations regarding men and women. “There was never a mixture, no campaign was addressed jointly to men and women.”

Without going into the history of syphilis, Carrara recalls that it was much more dangerous until World War II, when there was no penicillin. The disease was attributed hereditary characteristics, assuming that it would affect up to the seventh generation of the victim, producing racial degeneration. “There was this racial connotation, that is: it represented a threat to the race and, in subsequent generations, it was not related to sex”, he says.

It was during this period that attempts to combat syphilis emerged by regulating prostitution in red light areas. In France in the 19th century, a policy was implemented where the police and public health experts prepared statistics and registered prostitutes, who were then subjected to permanent surveillance. They could not leave those areas or change cities without notifying the police, they underwent regular medical examinations and, if infected, ended up being forced into hospital.

“The idea was that by “sanitizing” prostitutes, syphilis would be eliminated, as men would not be able to infect themselves”, says the professor. A basic principle prevailed: men could not abstain from sex and, as prostitutes were essential for this, the only thing left to do was to clean them up. “No one questioned the double standard of morality, which even allowed married men to visit brothels (what about single men), because it was physiological.”

Regulation –France and several other European countries managed to maintain that regulation for prostitution from the end of the 19th century until World War II. In Imperial Brazil, Dom Pedro II was personally against it, as he was not interested in adopting the idea of ​​a republican country. As for the Church, it refused to discuss the topic, as regulating the practice seemed to professionalize it.

It was the doctors from the Brazilian Academy of Medicine who were forced to take the initiative to implement an antivenereal policy. They even planned to join France and carry out a census in Rio de Janeiro, then the Federal District. “But this did not go through the political elites, because of the rivalry between the Brazilian empire and the French republic.”

Despite this, far from the Federal Capital, some experiments took place in Brazil. In Belém, a system was set up, although it was later aborted. There, the public authorities created a card for prostitutes, containing personal data, height, weight and the results of the medical examination. “They were classified as good, suspicious or prohibited, assuming that before the sexual act the client would ask for the card”, reports Carrara.

Just like in France, prostitutes could not change their address, suffered fines and had other obligations, in addition to being equally subject to the Magdalena Asylum in the event of interdiction. The professor highlights a curious photo collected in his research: in the women-only asylum, they are lined up in the corridor to be visited by a group of illustrious citizens, all men.

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