"De práticos a enfermeiros: os caminhos da enfermagem em Belo Horizonte - 1897-1933"

Abstract

The present study focuses on the nursing in Belo Horizonte, following the paths of its organization when it was still a practical knowledge and there was not a school for the professional training of nurses in the city. It aims to analyze the nursing in preprofessional period in the city, from 1897, the year of the inauguration of Belo Horizonte, until 1933, the year of the inauguration of the Escola de Enfermagem (Nursing School) Carlos Chagas, which is seen as a landmark for the professional training in nursing in Minas Gerais. The search for documentation started in hospital, medical and nursing institutions as well as in libraries and state agencies in an attempt to compose a historical narrative about the pre-professional period of the nursing. Initially, it was made an overview of historical studies, with emphasis on the production of Iberian countries, passing through the study of Latin American countries and culminating with Brazilian studies. This production indicates the existence of a specific group for the practice of caring for the sick, called nurses, with a body of knowledge, organized and structured and with public recognition, whose axis to its initial configuration was the religious tradition. With respect to Belo Horizonte, in the studied period, the nurses worked in general hospitals, in Hospital Militar as well as in the psychiatric hospital. In general hospitals, nursing was hierarchically organized, with head nurses and subordinates, each one performing anestablished function. The nuns were responsible to begin the process ofmodernization of nursing. They represented a progress for the organization and moralization of the hospital environment, being aided and subsequently replaced by lay nurses. For the case of military hospitals, what mattered was that nurses were military and, in the case of psychiatry, although it was emphasized the importance of expert nurses in this area, it was prevailed the empirical character of the activities.Nurses also carried out their activities in public health, in actions directed to combat and control epidemics and endemics and to the hygiene and health education of the population. In this case, acted in lazarettos, hostels, residences, isolation hospitals, health centers and dispensaries. The role of nurses in public health was driven by thesanitary thought of the time, prevailing initially actions surrounding the disease, and then around health. From a nurse turned to the work of disinfection and isolation of patients, hired to provide temporary services and without a qualification demand, we now have a nurse dedicated to the work of education and surveillance, continuously and with higher qualification in the provision of the required assistance. In general,we can say that the structure of the nursing followed the interests of medicine, this being responsible for determining the areas of nursing work, as well as limiting its performance possibilities. Medicine was the starting point for the development of nursing at that time and took advantage of it to develop itself too, as it needed to have an organized structure to work and with and the public acceptance, which inmany cases was made possible by the work of nurses.