Medicina e religiao: Conflito de competencia (review)
- Medicina e religião: Conflito de competência.
It is no wonder that the Amazonian physician and professor João Botelho (1948-) has had difficulties in conveying the wide scope of his book in its title: in English meaning “Medicine and Religion: Conflicts between Expertises,” the title fails to convey the book’s actual extent. For, as becomes clear in the final chapters, Botelho’s purpose in writing it was to evaluate the coexistence in Brazil of primitive medical practices with recent know-how in health care.
The author has also been unsuccessful in outlining his work in the introduction. Instead of explaining that initially he will analyze issues remote from his time and homeland, Botelho merely reveals that this study came to his mind a decade before, when he joined a survey of the nosological condition of twenty-three communities in the Amazon region. On that occasion, it came to his notice that those villagers had no scruples about combining long-standing empirical practices with modern medical procedures.
Misinformed by a generic title and a cursory introduction, readers are prompted by the first chapters to presume that Botelho’s work intends to present a historical overview of the conflicts opposing medicine and religion, beginning in prehistoric times. After discussing the establishment of hospitals in Portugal in early modern times, however, Botelho narrows down the scope of his study and approaches its ultimate aim. From the fourth chapter onward, he focuses on the history of flagrant contrasts afflicting medical assistance in Brazil. He particularly stresses the fact that, since colonial times, a scientific medicine has been known only to an elite, while most Brazilians continue relying on magico-religious therapeutics and believe that sickness is a divine punishment. Moreover, even though official medicine is unable to attend the populace, for political reasons, it has often raised religious claims to rebuke empirical practitioners. [End Page 190]
Concluding by commenting on the paramount sociopolitical changes needed to improve the health of his countrymen, Botelho darts from prehistoric to future times without deepening his observations on the disputes involving medicine and religion. It can be hoped that this scholar will believe worthy of a later book a closer examination of those conflicts in Brazil, whose medical past remains scantily charted.
