Da prática ao remédio: a inserção do aborto como estratégia médica nas revistas da Academia Médica do Rio de Janeiro (1860-1870)

Abstract

In the pages of the journals of the Imperial Academy of Medicine of Rio de Janeiro, there is a novelty imported from Europe in 1860: induced abortion. This procedure would have, according to a sociological historiography of science, spread in Brazil as a way of guaranteeing the birth market for the doctors' worksite, expelling the midwives and consolidating the obstetric subarea in the Tupiniquim scenario. By incurring in obstetrics as an effect of the dispute for the market, its novelty as knowledge is denied. In this sense, when analyzing the Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina archive, we selected the points that focused the debates in the two decades of investigation, the debate on abortion as a medical practice (1860) and the concern with drug therapy during pregnancy to avoid abortion. (1870). The objective of this article is to understand the medical discourse on childbirth in relation to abortion and how it was possible to form a look and instruments in which we could indicate a rupture with a certain way of thinking about care for birth.