The 1918 Pandemonium

a doctor's testimony to posterity

Abstract

To question how the doctor Moncorvo Filho narrates the Spanish flu pandemic in the book. O Pandemônio de 1918 (The 1918 Pandemonium), in addition to interpreting how he was inserted in a movement committed to thinking about the exercise of medicine articulated with pedagogical precepts of hygiene, constitute the horizon of this text. In interpreting the physician's work, we were guided by Sirinelli's (2003) intellectual perspective. We focused on Moncorvo Filho’s sociability network, on his political engagement in health and onthe way his generation faced that pandemic. We concluded that Moncorvo Filho, with the publication of the book, in 1924 – in which he denounced the social problems and the lack of sanitary conditions that hindered the action at that time – intended to record the testimony of a doctor who lived what was until then the biggest epidemic of history from an interventionist conception, that translated into practices aimed at preventing the spread of the disease.