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From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in

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From the Beginnings:
Debates on the History of Science in Brazil

Simone Petraglia Kropf and Gilberto Hochman

Nancy Stepan’s book Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical

Research and Policy, 1890 – 1920, published in 1976, has influenced debates on
science and the history of science in Brazil.1 Discussions prompted by Stepan’s
book have been directly linked to the emergence since the early 1980s of a new
historiography of science in this country as a professionalized and institution-
alized scholarly field. This process has been associated in turn with a broader
policy debate in Brazil and Spanish America on the particular features of sci-
ence and the history of science in the so-­called developing countries. Some of
the questions posed in Beginnings of Brazilian Science are still richly relevant to
academic and political consideration of the complex and specific historical and
social process of institutionalization of science. Here we will focus on the main
areas of historiographic debate, basing our discussion on the more representa-
tive works and authors, especially from the 1980s and 1990s.

Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Holloway. — eds.

This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented by Gilberto Hochman in the
session on “Nature, Science and the State in Latin America: Reflections on the Work
of Nancy Stepan,” at the 27th International Congress of the Latin American Studies
Association (LASA), Montreal, Canada, 5 – 8 September 2007. Research for this article was
funded by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)
and by the Strategic Research Program (PAPES) of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. We would like
to thank the two anonymous referees and Dominichi Miranda de Sá for their criticisms and
suggestions and the HAHR editors for the support of the translation of the article. — aus.
1. The book was published in the same year in Portuguese, in an edition that
unfortunately omitted the notes and bibliography of the original: Nancy Stepan, Gênese e
evolução da ciência brasileira: Oswaldo Cruz e a política de investigação científica e médica (Rio
de Janeiro: Artenova / Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, 1976). In this article we cite the English
edition of 1981: Nancy Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research
and Policy, 1890 – 1920 (New York: Science History Publications, 1981).

Hispanic American Historical Review 91:3

doi 10.1215/00182168-1300128
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
392 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

The History of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute as a Model

for Science and Technology Policy

Stepan analyzed the early decades of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (IOC),
founded in 1900 at Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, which was the original nucleus
of what would become the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz).2 She saw it as
an emblematic example of the circumstances that made possible in Brazil the
implantation of science as an institutionalized activity, publicly recognized and
capable of surviving the difficulties typical of a “developing” or “peripheral”
country, and of “late” and “dependent” industrialization. These were categories
that shaped the wider debates in Latin America during the 1970s surrounding
dependency theory, and Beginnings of Brazilian Science (hereafter cited as Begin-
nings) was influenced by those debates.
The time of the writing and publication of Beginnings was an important
milestone in the political discussions of these issues. At that moment, as the
government of General Ernesto Geisel (1974 – 79) took the first steps toward the
“easing” (distensão) of the dictatorship imposed in 1964, it was also organizing a
national policy for scientific and technological development, which was under-
stood to be crucial for the acceleration of Brazilian industrial development.3
Among the important and innovative characteristics of that era of state plan-
ning was the role given to scientists in formulating and implementing policies
and funding for this field, in line with the new models and challenges stemming
from the professionalization of international science in the postwar period. The
reflections of Derek de Solla Price on the changes that accompanied the emer-
gence of “big science” after World War II were among Stepan’s points of theo-
retical reference, providing orientation for the questions she raised regarding
the possibility of following these new tendencies in countries such as Brazil.

2. The Instituto Soroterápico Federal or Instituto de Manguinhos (called Instituto

Oswaldo Cruz beginning in 1908) was created in 1900 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital city
at the time, to produce the serums and vaccines to counter an epidemic of bubonic plague.
Under the direction of the young bacteriologist Oswaldo Cruz (1872 – 1917), who had been
trained at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and had distinguished himself in combating yellow
fever in Rio de Janeiro between 1903 and 1909, the institute expanded its activities and
became a renowned center for the production of immunobiological materials, research, and
teaching in the field of bacteriology and tropical medicine. In 1970, Fiocruz was created,
combining the IOC and other institutes. See Jaime L. Benchimol, ed., Manguinhos, do sonho
à vida: A ciência na Belle Époque (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, 1990); Jaime Larry
Benchimol and Luiz Antonio Teixeira, Cobras, lagartos & outros bichos: Uma história comparada
dos institutos Oswaldo Cruz e Butantan (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1993).
3. On the military government in Brazil, see Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press: 1999).
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 393

Fiocruz was part of this process in the same period. In the introduction to
the Brazilian edition of Beginnings, Vinicius da Fonseca, the president of Fiocruz
at the time and an economist with experience in the federal Secretariat of Plan-
ning, made use of Stepan’s thesis to support his own administration, which he
saw as intended to promote the “scientific rehabilitation” of Manguinhos after
several decades of what he considered to be “lamentable decadence.”4 Fonseca
summarized the scientific project of Oswaldo Cruz that he wished to recover
as follows: “This disposition for applied science allowed him, at the same time,
to create conditions for establishing a center for basic research, which achieved
international recognition.”5
Aside from the significance that Fonseca and other administrators of
national science and technology policy gave to the issues and interpreta-
tions posed by Beginnings, their relevance for the era of the book’s publication
stemmed from the sociological perspective through which the author studied
the earlier historical period of an institution that had become a key reference
within Brazilian science. Stepan uses the case of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz to
lay out guidelines for the policy makers and scientists of the 1970s, who faced
challenges similar to those she saw as underlying the Manguinhos project at the
beginning of the twentieth century.

A New History of the Sciences in Latin America

In 1979 – 80, in an important collection of essays providing an overview of the

history of the sciences in Brazil, Maria Amélia Mascarenhas Dantes analyzed
the main scientific institutions that preceded the creation of Brazilian univer-
sities.6 That essay called into question a thesis common at the time, present

4. Beginning in the 1950s, various IOC scientists argued that the institute had lost the
prestige that it had achieved under Oswaldo Cruz and Carlos Chagas. The dictatorship’s
suspension in the late 1960s of several scientists’ political rights further aggravated a
situation described by many as one of “decadence.”
5. Vinicius da Fonseca, “Apresentação,” in Stepan, Gênese e evolução da ciência
brasileira, 3 – 4.
6. This collection of essays was edited with the support of the National Council
for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), which indicates that a group of
policy makers were interested in “lessons from history” to push science and technology
development. Maria Amélia Mascarenhas Dantes, “Institutos de pesquisa científica no
Brasil,” in História das ciências no Brasil, ed. Mário Guimarães Ferri and Shozo Motoyama
(São Paulo: EPU / EDUSP, CNPq, 1979/80), vol. 2, 343 – 80. After an undergraduate degree
in physics, Dantes earned a doctorate in Social History at the University of São Paulo (USP)
in 1973. Her work was decisive for the institutionalization of the history of science in the
postgraduate program of the department of history at USP, where many researchers in this
394 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

especially in the work of Fernando de Azevedo, according to which the effective

establishment of science in Brazil began with the organization of universities in
the 1930s, particularly with the creation of the University of São Paulo in 1934.7
Dantes sought to show that long before the emergence of universities, taken as
the location par excellence of institutionalized science, Brazilian scientific activ-
ity had flourished since the beginning of the nineteenth ­century in other set-
tings, including museums, botanical gardens, and institutes dedicated to biologi-
cal and agronomical research. In contrast to an earlier tradition of hagiographic
descriptive memoirs written by the scientists themselves, Dantes made extensive
use of original primary sources and placed the scientific institutions in their
historical and social contexts, thus opening new analytical perspectives based
on the methods of social history. Her essay is considered a turning point in the
historiography on the institutionalization of the sciences in Brazil and in the
renovation of the field of the history of science in that country.8
Dantes’s essay cited Stepan’s Beginnings in reference to the history of the
Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. Both authors affirmed that, before the universities,
the research institutes were spaces where the “modern concept of experimental
research” was introduced in Brazil.9 Regarding the bacteriological institutes that
emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen-
tieth in the context of fighting epidemic diseases, Dantes pointed to the same
issues addressed by Stepan concerning the route by which the IOC surpassed
the limited purposes for which it had been created (the fight against bubonic
plague) and became a “high level research center, in which several generations of
biologists were trained.”10 For both authors, this process was made possible by
the personal efforts of Oswaldo Cruz, by the political visibility achieved in the
yellow fever campaign, by the focus on the training of new researchers, and by
scientific expeditions to several parts of the country that broadened scientists’
perspectives and their research themes. Furthermore, by placing her analysis
in the context of the formulation and implementation of a national science and
technology policy in the 1970s, Dantes also focused on the particular features
of science in a developing country.

field have been trained under her supervision. These researchers would play an
important role in creating new spaces for the history of science in other institutions.
7. Fernando de Azevedo, As ciências no Brasil, 2 vols. (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1955).
8. See for example Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência
e respostas locais: Sobre a institucionalização das ciências naturais no Brasil,” Asclepio 50,
no. 2 (1998): 110.
9. Dantes, “Institutos de pesquisa científica no Brasil,” 343.
10. Ibid., 351.
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 395

In the same volume in which Dantes’s essay appeared, an article on the his-
tory of science in Brazil celebrated the process of “the institutionalization of
the discipline” and the search for research questions “linked to Brazilian reality
and its peculiarities.”11 As indicators of that tendency, the authors cited the first
doctoral theses at the Universidade de São Paulo in history of science, including
those of Shozo Motoyama (1971) and Dantes (1973). Along with other works,
they also cited Beginnings. “Despite having been written by a foreign historian,”
the authors affirmed, Stepan’s book was an example of discussions of “the cre-
ation of local scientific capacity.”12 Twenty years after this 1979 – 80 collection of
essays, in taking stock of the historiographic trend that made the study of scien-
tific institutions the preferred route to reflect on the social dimensions of science
and its contextual nature, Dantes explicitly affirmed the importance of Begin-
nings as “a milestone of the institutional history of the sciences in Brazil.”13
The approach sketched by Dantes in 1980, reinforced by those who saw
in it the beginnings of a new historiography, meshed at the time with a more
general movement for the theoretical and methodological renovation of the
history of science in Latin America. This trend was expressed institutionally
by the creation of the Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y
la Tecnología (SLAHCT, Latin American Society for the History of Sciences
and Technology) in 1982, and the establishment of the Sociedade Brasileira
de História da Ciência in the following year. According to Silvia Figueirôa, a
member of the second generation consolidating this historiographic renewal in
the 1990s, several fundamental principles brought together this regional “cross-
­fertilization.”14

11. J. Carlos V. Garcia, J. Carlos de Oliveira, and Shozo Motoyama, “O

desenvolvimento da história da ciência no Brasil,” in História das ciências no Brasil,
ed. Mário Guimarães Ferri and Shozo Motoyama (São Paulo: EPU / EDUSP, CNPq,
1979/80), vol. 2, 406 – 7.
12. Ibid., 408. In 1980 José Murilo de Carvalho published a book on the Escola de
Minas de Ouro Preto, a center of engineering and geology education established in 1876,
which like the IOC remains active until the present day. Carvalho also cites Stepan’s
Beginnings of Brazilian Science as an important reference for historical studies on the
institutionalization of science in Brazil. This book was also published with the support of a
science and technology federal funding agency. José Murilo de Carvalho, A Escola de Minas
de Ouro Preto: O peso da glória (Rio de Janeiro: Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / São
Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1978).
13. Maria Amélia M. Dantes, “Introdução: Uma história institucional das ciências
no Brasil,” in Espaços da ciência no Brasil (1800 – 1930), ed. Maria Amélia M. Dantes (Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2001), 17.
14. Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 110.
396 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

The first point was a focus on the contextual nature of science, or the study
of “the history of concrete scientific practices, which found a place to develop
in local scientific institutions.”15 Associated with this approach, and giving it a
clearly political and nationalistic dimension, was the effort to demonstrate that
vigorous scientific research did take place in “peripheral” locations that tradi-
tionally had been seen as inappropriate or even incompatible with the flourish-
ing of science. As summarized by the first director of SLAHCT, the Mexican
Juan José Saldaña, “to think about our science” became the watchword of those
who sought to analyze the specificities and particular contexts of scientific activ-
ity in Latin America.16
One of the principal targets of this critique was the work of Fernando de
Azevedo, according to which the Catholic Iberian tradition imposed on the
colonies an obscurantist cultural policy, creating strong obstacles to scientific
enterprise. For Azevedo, science in Brazil was marked by backwardness and was
only effectively institutionalized with the establishment of universities. Saldaña,
like Dantes, praised Stepan’s efforts to bring to light concrete examples of
the institutionalization of the sciences in Latin America and to understand the
specific mechanisms that led to the production of “scientific excellence in the
periphery,” to use the title of the work by the Peruvian historian Marcos Cueto,
which well synthesizes this focus in Latin American historiography.17 Stepan
made that orientation explicit in the introduction to Beginnings: “We still know

15. Ibid. Methodological advances and the constitution of the history of science
as a specific field within history in Brazil formed part of a larger international tendency
toward the renovation and renewal of the historiography of science. Starting in the 1970s,
especially under the influence of the so-­called Strong Program of the sociology of scientific
knowledge, new approaches were proposed for the social study of science, which should
be seen as a socio-­cognitive activity produced by concrete collectivities under specific
historical circumstances. See Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological
Reconstructions,” History of Science 20 (1982): 157 – 211.
16. Juan José Saldaña, “Ciência e identidade cultural: História da ciência na América
Latina,” in Um olhar sobre o passado: História das ciências na América Latina, ed. Silvia
Figueirôa (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp / São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2001), 18 – 19.
One of the founding works of this new historiography of the sciences in Latin America
is the collection edited by Juan José Saldaña, El perfil de la ciencia en América: XI Congreso
Interamericano de Filosofía (Mexico City: Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las
Ciencias y la Tecnología, 1986). The journal Quipu, edited by Saldaña, was a main vehicle
for scholarly production in this new historiographical vein.
17. Saldaña, “Ciência e identidade cultural,” 21. Marcos Cueto, Excelencia científica en la
periferia: Actividades científicas y investigación biomédica en el Perú, 1890 – 1950 (Lima: Grade-
­Concytec, 1989).
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 397

little about which factors are essential for the growth of science in countries that
historically did not participate in the scientific or industrial revolutions.”18
Saldaña and other Spanish American and Brazilian historians empha-
sized the need for a methodological renovation in an effort to overcome what
he called “historiographical mimesis,” that is, the tendency to adopt analytical
models which, with their point of reference in the “core” countries, failed to
consider conditions specific to Latin American science.19 In addition to chal-
lenging Azevedo, who took a Weberian approach with regard to the socio­
cultural conditions that made possible the success of science in countries like
the United States, this criticism was directed especially against the model pro-
posed by George Basalla in 1967 on the diffusion and reception of scientific
ideas in different regions and countries.20 As a corollary to the Eurocentric point
of view identified in his model, Basalla was severely challenged for suggesting
that peripheral countries were merely receivers and repeaters of exogenous
theories and practices. The Latin American scholars called for a new approach
that emphasizes the processes of mediation and reinterpretation between the
original theoretical systems and the particular contexts that absorbed and
re-created those ideas, in a bidirectional movement that involves negotiations
and accommodations in center-­periphery relations.21 In the specific case of Bra-

18. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 3.

19. Some representative works focusing on this issue are Lewis Pyenson, “In partibus
infidelium: Imperialist Rivalries and Exact Sciences in Early Twentieth-­Century Argentina,”
Quipu 1 (1984): 253 – 303; Antonio Lafuente and José Sala Catalá, “Ciencia colonial y roles
profesionales en la América española del siglo XVIII,” Quipu 6 (1989): 387 – 403; Luis Carlos
Arboleda, “Acerca del problema de la difusión científica en la periferia: El caso de la física
newtoniana en la Nueva Granada,” Quipu 4 (1987): 7 – 30.
20. George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611 – 22.
21. The idea proposed by Xavier Polanco of “world-­science [science-­monde],” which
sees a system of spaces connected by networks, the borders and hierarchies of which
are contingent and changeable, has been seen by many as a good alternative to the
fixed linearity of the diffusionist model, and a way to think about the mechanisms for
universalizing European science while allowing for the construction of local scientific
traditions outside of those centers: Xavier Polanco, “Une science-­monde: La mondialization
de la science européenne et la création de traditions scientifiques locales,” in Naissance et
développement de la science-­monde: Production et reproduction des communautés scientifiques en
Europe et Amérique latine, ed. Xavier Polanco (Paris: Éditions La découverte / Conseil de
L’Europe / UNESCO, 1990). Roy MacLeod’s concept of the “moving-­metropolis,” an effort
to reflect on the complexities of scientific exchange in imperial settings, was equally well
received by Latin American historians as an alternative to Basalla’s model. Roy MacLeod,
“On Visiting the Moving Metropolis: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,”
Historical Records of Australian Science 5 (1982): 1 – 14.
398 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

zilian historiography, several authors, by analyzing scientific experiences in the

nineteenth century, have shown how Brazilian scientists used the theoretical
tools of European science, not with a time lag or in a passive way, but selectively
and creatively to develop original solutions to understand and deal with prob-
lems specific to Brazil.22
Dantes recognizes that the study by Basalla, despite being much criticized,
had the positive effect of stimulating “studies of the mechanisms of scientific
diffusion and the establishment of scientific activities in the various national
contexts.”23 An important result of this movement was to emphasize the theme
of national science and the relationship between nationalism and science, which
has become an important aspect of the larger discussion of the specificity of
science in different historical contexts. In this regard, the intense debate sur-
rounding the quincentennial of the discovery of America is worth noting. As
José M. López Piñero has pointed out, that event gave rise to important reflec-
tions on the idea of colonization and, consequently, on the delineation of identi-
ties and the flow of ideas, including scientific ideas, between the metropoles and
colonies.24
The theme of the globalization of science and the shaping of a national sci-
ence is central to the work of Nancy Stepan. She dealt with it in her historical
analysis of the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, which according to her was constituted
as a national school of science precisely because in the field of tropical medicine
it established a fundamental balance between Brazilian political circumstances

22. See for example the essays in the collection edited by Dantes, Espaços da ciência
no Brasil (1800 – 1930). In the field of the history of medicine, these studies stand out:
Luiz Otávio Ferreira, “O nascimento de uma instituição científica: Os periódicos médicos
brasileiros da primeira metade do século XIX” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo,
1996); Luiz Otávio Ferreira, “Os periódicos médicos e a invenção de uma agenda sanitária
para o Brasil (1827 – 1843),” História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 6, no. 2 (1999): 331 – 51;
Julyan Peard, Race, Place and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-­Century Brazilian
Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999); Flavio Edler, “A constituição da medicina
tropical no Brasil oitocentista: Da climatologia à parasitologia médica” (PhD diss.,
Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 1999); Jaime Larry Benchimol, Dos micróbios aos
mosquitos: Febre amarela e a revolução pasteuriana no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz /
Editora UFRJ, 1999).
23. Dantes, “Introdução: Uma história institucional das ciência no Brasil,” 16.
24. José M. López Piñero, “La tradición de la historiografia de la ciencia y su
coyuntura actual: Los condicionantes de um congreso,” in Mundialización de la ciencia y la
cultura nacional: Actas del Congreso Internacional Ciencia, Descubrimiento y Mundo Colonial, ed.
Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and Maria Luiza Ortega (Madrid: Editorial Doce Calles,
1993), 23 – 52.
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 399

and problems, on the one hand, and the horizons of international science, on
the other. Furthermore, Stepan’s work brought the theme to the fore because of
its political importance for state planning in the area of science and technology
in the 1970s.
Stepan’s use of Basalla’s diffusionist model was, and continues to be, one
of the main targets of the criticisms directed toward Beginnings of Brazilian Sci-
ence.25 Despite the importance it assumes in her analysis, it is interesting to note
that Stepan herself pointed to the model’s limitations in not taking into con-
sideration the particular conditions of the developing world, such as the effect
that structural dependency and late industrialization in the Latin American
countries might have on the possibility of establishing autonomy in the fields of
science and technology.26 Dantes commented on Stepan’s focus on the specific
social conditions of the institutionalization of scientific activity in Brazil, noting
its “proximity to studies from the 1970s of the social history of science.”27

Was It Really the Beginning? Science before and after 1900

In addition to critiques of her adoption of the diffusionist model, Stepan’s book

was strongly disputed by those who thought that, beginning with the title, it
would reinforce the traditional interpretation that the period preceding the
universities, or at least the institutes of biomedical research such as the IOC,
had been a “prehistory” of science in Brazil, characterized either by the absence
of science, or at most by initiatives that were infrequent, precarious, and car-
ried out mostly by foreigners and without continuity over time. In this regard,
Dantes’s essay is seen as marking a changing perspective. In addition to her
discussion of the centers of biological science of the late nineteenth century and
early twentieth century, Dantes discussed institutions dating from as far back as
the early nineteenth century.
During the 1990s several doctoral dissertations emerged from this new his-
tory of science. The proliferation of research topics and a strong emphasis on
empirical research based on the standards of academic history gave increased
prominence to this historiographic trend dedicated to “demonstrating the exis-
tence of scientific activity in Brazil since colonial times.”28 Studies based pri-

25. See for example Figueirôa, “Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 109.
26. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 15.
27. Dantes, “Introdução: Uma história institucional das ciências no Brasil,” 19.
28. Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa, As ciências geológicas no Brasil: Uma história
social e institucional, 1875 – 1934 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997), 16.
400 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

marily on nineteenth-­century institutions such as museums, botanical gardens,

official commissions, scientific societies, periodical publications, and the like
brought into question some of the ideas accepted up to that time. One example
is the idea that the Portuguese state and mentality had been obstacles to the
development of science. Taking as an important reference the work of Maria
Odila da Silva Dias on the pragmatism of the Luso-­Brazilian enlightenment,
scholars sought to show, as Figueirôa has argued, “how, in the transition from
the old colonial system, the modernizing socio-­economic reforms carried out
by Portugal, based on enlightenment ideas, adopted a policy of state-­sponsored
development, and the promotion of natural sciences became an explicit concern
of the Portuguese government.”29
The idea that science was absent or precarious before the beginning of the
twentieth century, which some scholars questioned in Stepan’s book, was also
attributed to another often-­cited work by Simon Schwartzman, published not
long after Beginnings.30 Both authors, writing during an important moment
in the formulation and implementation of a Brazilian science and technology
policy, dealt with the same list of themes: How to plan science in a developing
country? How to guarantee the institutionalization of a “national” science as
a basis for social and economic development? How to overcome the obstacles
or resistance stemming from the dependent nature of economic development
in Brazil? How to prevent expectations that science should have social utility,
especially in a country with few resources for scientific activity, from hindering

29. Maria Odila da Silva Dias, “Aspectos da ilustração no Brasil,” Revista do Instituto
Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 278 (1968): 105 – 70. Quote, Figueirôa, “Mundialização da
ciência e respostas locais,” 112. In addition to the work of Silvia Figueirôa on the geological
sciences in Brazil, see also Maria Amélia M. Dantes, “Fases da implantação da ciência no
Brasil,” Quipu 5, no. 22 (1988): 265 – 75; Heloisa Maria Bertol Domingues, “Ciência: Um
caso de política. As relações entre as ciências naturais e a agricultura no Brasil-­Império”
(PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1995); Heloisa Maria Bertol Domingues, “As
ciências naturais e contrução da nação brasileira,” Revista de História (USP) 135, no. 2 (1996):
41 – 59; Maria Rachel Fróes da Fonseca, “ ‘A única ciência é a Pátria’: O discurso científico
na construção do Brasil e do México (1770 – 1815)” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo,
1996); Maria Rachel Fróes da Fonseca, “La construcción de la patria por el discurso
científico: México y Brasil (1770 – 1830),” Secuencia, Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales 45
(Sep. – Dec. 1999): 5 – 26; Maria Margareth Lopes, O Brasil descobre a pesquisa científica: Os
museus e as ciências naturais no século XIX (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997).
30. Simon Schwartzman, Formação da comunidade científica no Brasil (São Paulo:
Companhia Editora Nacional / Rio de Janeiro: FINEP, 1979). A revised edition was
published in English in 1991: A Space for Science: The Development of the Scientific Community
in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1991).
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 401

the survival and development of science as a producer of knowledge beyond the

applied sphere? How to ensure the appropriate balance between basic or pure
science, and applied science or technology?
Both Stepan and Schwartzman were challenged by some practitioners of
the new historiography of the sciences for the periodization that placed the
beginnings of institutionalized science in Brazil in the first years of the twenti-
eth century (with Schwartzman placing greater emphasis on the foundation of
universities). According to Schwartzman, the criteria that differentiate between
the “pioneers” and the “founders” of Brazilian science were the consistency of
their contribution to the advancement of knowledge and ability to train stu-
dents, which in turn guaranteed continuity through time of a research tradi-
tion.31 Despite advocating a broadening of the historical study of the sciences
beyond the countries that have been at the center of industrial and scientific
development, Schwartzman emphasized the fragility of science in the periphery
with regard to original contributions and real social and economic impact, at
least before it was professionalized in the universities.32 In this sense he rein-
forced the periodization already put forth by Stepan. Science in Brazil, for
Schwartzman, at least in the earlier period, was a labor of Sisyphus, the meta-
phor with which he begins his book: “The successes were few, and in general,
ephemeral.” Thus Schwartzman agreed with Fernando de Azevedo regarding
the sociocultural obstacles to the implantation of science in Brazil, affirming
that “time would show that these difficulties were greater than had been sup-
posed, in Brazil as in almost all the countries which after World War II sought
to enter the world of modern science, as the specter of stagnation and involution
began to appear.”33
In the preface to Beginnings, Stepan dealt explicitly with the problem of
periodization between the successive stages of the institutionalization of Brazil-

31. Schwartzman, Formação da comunidade científica no Brasil, 3 – 4.

32. In his words: “The idea is to understand science not in its most spectacular and
visible aspects, but in its permanence and continuity. In this sense the history of science in
the periphery necessarily becomes social history. This is because there is probably little to
know and narrate in relation to the history of original ideas or of really significant impacts
of science on society and economy, in contexts in which scientific activity has always had a
relatively marginal importance and priority. But there is certainly much to tell about and to
understand regarding efforts to establish a “normal” science, a modern university system,
and a capacity to participate effectively, even if not centrally, in the contemporary frontiers
of knowledge. It is the history of this effort, with its successes and failures, that needs to be
told and understood.” Schwartzman, Formação da comunidade científica no Brasil, 7 – 8.
33. Ibid., 1, 9.
402 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

ian science, explaining how she came to adopt the term “beginnings” to situate
the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz as a milestone in that process. Pointing out that her
interest in the case of the Manguinhos Institute came from her broader schol-
arly interest in studying the founding and maintenance of scientific institutions,
she made this clear: “Concerning the title of the book, it is obvious from my
long discussion of the history of the sciences in Brazil before 1900 that there was
much science in Brazil before Oswaldo Cruz and the institute he created. How-
ever, my emphasis is on research science as an organized, institutional endeavor,
and in this respect the Oswaldo Cruz Institute represents the beginnings of
Brazilian science.”34
Through the rest of the book, going back to science before 1900 in order
to then analyze the first two decades of Manguinhos in more detail, Stepan laid
out the basic criteria by which she characterized the “success” of the IOC as the
“beginnings” of science in Brazil. It is important to keep in mind that, despite
the historical purpose of the study, her arguments are sociological in nature,
guided by the questions posed by Joseph Ben-­David: What institutional condi-
tions ensure the organization of science as a social subsystem which, while it
is recognized and legitimized by its interdependence with society as a whole,
also has the autonomy to function according to the particular mechanisms and
logics of science, recognized and guaranteed in such a way that applied social
needs do not hinder the continuity of science as a knowledge-­producing activ-
ity? In other words, what are the institutional conditions for the scientist to be
recognized in his social role?35
The reply we find in Beginnings is that, under the leadership of Oswaldo
Cruz from 1900 to 1917 and Carlos Chagas from 1917 to 1934, the IOC grad-
ually built up its legitimacy as a space for national science with international
prestige, that is, as a research institute closely oriented toward Brazilian public
health problems (such as tropical diseases) in such a way that these issues would
be of interest to medical scientists outside the country. In Stepan’s words, “A
concentration on Brazilian problems did not rule out the possibility of mak-
ing discoveries that shed light on disease mechanisms in general, or on similar
diseases in other countries.” Beyond the pragmatic interests of the social sectors
that supported it, the IOC became a center of experimental medicine capable of
producing innovations, in tune with the movement to broaden the frontiers of
knowledge. The exemplary case in this process was the study of American try-

34. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, unpaginated preface.

35. Joseph Ben-­David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1971).
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 403

panosomiasis, or Chagas disease, discovered by Carlos Chagas in 1909, which

became one of the great showcases and bases of support for the institutional
project of Manguinhos and established a tradition of research in Brazil lasting
up to the present.36
According to Stepan, the possibility of an institutionalized science of the
type exemplified by the IOC, that is, the ability of an institution to survive not
only through time but in the sense of institutional reproduction, depends fun-
damentally on its ability to go beyond the applied dimension, even though that
might have been the grounds for its original creation. In her words, it had to
evolve “from a semi-­autonomous organization of applied science into a recog-
nized institution of basic and applied science.”37 This was the case with the IOC,
which was created as a result of an epidemic crisis and then broadened its social,
cognitive, and administrative scope, thanks to the success of Oswaldo Cruz in
the campaign against yellow fever in the nation’s capital.38 Stepan argues that
this institution-­building process was based on three pillars that constituted the
model followed by the Pasteur Institute in Paris and adopted in Manguinhos:
the ability to recruit and train research scientists; the establishment of a client
relationship with the government and other agencies that could be expected to
use the scientific knowledge produced by the institute; and “the development of
a research program that would be feasible, would meet Brazilian needs, and yet
not be too closely tied to local concerns.”39

36. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 122. A study by Simone Kropf refers to the
arguments of Stepan and other authors regarding the centrality of Chagas disease research
at Manguinhos in analyzing the process of construction and validation of this disease as a
question involving science, health, and debates on the nation. Simone Kropf, Doença de Chagas,
doença do Brasil: Ciência, saúde e nação (1909 – 1962) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2009).
37. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 105.
38. Several of the studies in the new historiography of science argued that, far from
preventing the institutionalization of science in Brazil, the pragmatic and applied nature
of scientific activity was actually the most direct route toward that end. See Figueirôa,
“Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais,” 117.
39. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 105 – 6. The idea of the Pasteur Institute
as the model for these three elements goes far beyond the configuration of three areas
of activity (teaching, production of medical and biological materials, and research). It is a
specific model of organization that creates a balance between applied science (which assures
support and social legitimacy), and science intended to advance the frontiers of knowledge
(thus assuring scientific legitimacy). A key notion used by Stepan to understand the
interdependence between these different types of science is the idea of the “scientific system
of research” proposed by Jean-­Jacques Salomon in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1973).
404 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

Regarding the research program, Stepan also listed the factors she consid-
ered responsible for the successful program that distinguished Manguinhos as
a renowned research center: concentration on specific areas of knowledge (in
this case, protozoology), in order to strengthen the capacity to attract scien-
tists; little separation between the basic and applied aspects of research, which
was facilitated by the fact that the institution focused on microbiology, typi-
cally a problem-­oriented field; and the ability to focus on issues directly related
to Brazilian problems but which, at the same time, were related to the inter­
national field of science, so that the Brazilian scientists could become “exporters
of ideas.”40 This was the basis for the IOC, while establishing itself as a center
of “national” science, to become an institute of tropical medicine similar to the
European institutions established in that era.
It is interesting to note that, in addition to the influence of the Pasteur Insti-
tute, several other factors analyzed by Stepan shaped the interpretive framework
that was then fleshed out by Brazilian historians who dedicated themselves to
further research on the trajectory of the IOC. These were factors such as the
importance of crises of epidemic diseases for the institutionalization of medical
science in Brazil, the role of the state as a source of promotion and funding in
this area, the close association with themes and problems of public health, and
the importance of research expeditions for the broadening of the geographic
and social frontiers of the institution. This research on the IOC’s history began
in earnest in 1986 with the creation of the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, a unit within
Fiocruz dedicated to the history of science. Furthermore, we see in many of Ste-
pan’s interpretive conclusions the basic underpinnings of the institution’s vision
of itself, not only in the “heroic era” of its first decades but as a tradition that has
been maintained in the present and serves as a guide for the future.41
Another criticism is directed at Stepan for the division she makes between
science before 1900 and the success of the IOC as a model of a new institutional

40. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 122. Also exemplary in this regard is the
case of the studies of American trypanosomiasis, widely recognized as one of the endemic
scourges of the nation, and at the same time a research subject capable of resulting in new
knowledge in the field of tropical medicine.
41. Regarding Stepan’s pioneering work in the historiography of the IOC, it is
important to mention the great number of primary sources she used at a time when the
archives of the institution had not yet been systematically organized. Among the main
authors who have done research on the institutional history of Manguinhos, the following
stand out: Benchimol, Manguinhos, do sonho à vida; Benchimol and Teixeira, Cobras, lagartos
& outros bichos; Nara Britto, Oswaldo Cruz: A construção de um mito na ciência brasileira (Rio de
Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 1995).
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 405

pattern for Brazilian science. It stems from the reaction of the new historiogra-
phy of the sciences in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, against a tradition
based on the narrative of great achievements or great figures of science. That
tradition was generally celebratory, hagiographic, and merely descriptive, and
rejection of it was due to the professionalization of the field of history of science
itself and to the increasing importance of theoretical and methodological tools
specific to the field of social history. It was also part of a project to recover the
scientific experience on the periphery which, because of its marginal position in
relation to the center, had not been included in the great narratives of “univer-
sal” science.
As Lewis Pyenson affirmed, researchers located in the first-­rank universi-
ties “forget . . . that the history of science in the United States is strewn with the
cadavers of colleges, observatories, atheneums, and academies of various types,
now extinct. . . . It is time to construct a clear and complete description of mod-
ern science in Latin America. . . . The results of such a study would reveal thou-
sands of individuals flourishing in centers of teaching and research.”42 Figueirôa
cites this passage in order to justify investment in the study of scientific insti-
tutions that have not been crowned with the same visibility and achievements
as the great research institutes or universities: “The methodologies usually
employed by the historiography of the sciences, carried out in the so-­called
‘centers,’ focus attention on the ‘great theories’ and ‘great figures,’ or on ‘institu-
tional successes.’ Thus they have produced analytical categories for a ‘history of
the winners,’ leaving aside the day-­to-­day history of the sciences which in reality
makes up most of the process.”43
The central question posed by Stepan is, in our view, much closer to the pro-
gram of this new historiography. By seeking to analyze the conditions for “sci-
entific excellence on the periphery,” Stepan took up the category of “success” in
its sociological sense, as comprising certain conditions that lead to recognition,
visibility, and institutional replicability. From this perspective, the same model
that explains the survivors permits one to understand the “cadavers.” According
to Stepan, there are several criteria for measuring success: the creation of stable
and productive institutions of fundamental and applied sciences; the ability to
survive over time and to diversify its staff and range of activities; the continued
ability to recruit and train scientists; the ability to increase support for science;
the ability to influence other institutions of science within the country; the abil-
ity to choose research topics related to local problems and needs (such as tropi-

42. Cited in Figueirôa, As ciências geológicas no Brasil, 17.

43. Ibid.
406 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

cal diseases), and to use those themes to connect to the international scientific
agenda and thus contribute to the general growth of knowledge.44
Finally, some authors criticize Stepan’s argument regarding the beginnings
of Brazilian science as reinforcing a vast commemorative tradition defending
the notion that before Oswaldo Cruz, medical science was in a “pre-­scientific”
phase, that is, that the successes of experimental medicine at Manguinhos rep-
resented the beginning of a scientific, laboratory-­based medicine, cognitively
superior to the clinical medicine practiced in the nineteenth century.45 It is true
that some parts of Stepan’s work could support such an interpretation, which
has been called into question by historians showing how the so-­called Pasteur-
ian revolution, both internationally and in Brazil, in reality did not involve a
sharp break with earlier paradigms and practices. Those scholars have pointed
out that, on the contrary, it was a long and complex process involving back and
forth interactions at both the conceptual and social levels.46
We must emphasize, however, that when Stepan laid out the periodization
contained in the idea of “beginnings,” she was mainly referring to different
processes of institutional development, rather than cognitive logics related to
the theory and practice of medicine.47 By privileging microbiology as an espe-

44. Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 8 – 9.

45. See for example the comments on Stepan by Flavio Edler, “O debate em torno da
medicina experimental no Segundo Reinado,” História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 3,
no. 2 (1996): 290.
46. Some clear examples of this perspective are the works cited above by Peard and
Edler on the medical science (more specifically tropical medicine) in the nineteenth century,
and by Jaime Benchimol on the generation of Pasteurians who preceded the career of
Oswaldo Cruz (Dos micróbios aos mosquitos). It relies on extensive empirical work and has
followed the international tendency to develop a more nuanced view of historical processes
that were traditionally seen as points of rupture. These approaches have also tried to
avoid anachronism and the teleology of traditional narratives, analyzing scientific activity
according to the patterns of such activity in the periods in which it takes place. Despite
differences among these authors, there is a common denominator in their work. They make
an effort to analyze the particular circumstances and characteristics of medical science in
Brazil at different points during the nineteenth century; and they try to show that certain
themes and practices traditionally seen as specific to medicine after Oswaldo Cruz and other
Pasteurians were widespread and influential before the emergence of so-­called experimental
medicine, even if under other cognitive, social, and institutional conditions.
47. Stepan refers to a possible argument that the success of the IOC might be put in
the context of a wider international movement involving changes in the medical sciences
based on new theories of microbiology and tropical medicine, or “a shift away from purely
clinical medicine to laboratory medicine.” While recognizing “a certain truth” in this view,
in which one can detect the idea of the superiority of so-­called laboratory medicine, she
immediately shifts the question to focus on her central thesis: “A major argument of this
From the Beginnings: Debates on the History of Science in Brazil 407

cially favorable path to the institutionalization of science in the model of suc-

cess established by the IOC, Stepan is not proposing the supposed cognitive
superiority of Pasteurian science. Rather, she is interested in highlighting the
particularities of microbiology as contributing to the articulation between basic
and applied science, balancing utilitarian aspects with innovations in medical
knowledge.
The critiques of narratives or scientific origin myths that heap praise on
the “founding fathers” of microbiology and tropical medicine (such as Oswaldo
Cruz) certainly brought important reflections and new paths of research. How-
ever, we should not downplay the sense of discontinuity and the importance of
that sense of break, especially for the actors who carried it out and benefited
from it. Such scientists were, in fact, expressions of something new, to the extent
that they saw themselves and were recognized as such.48 What is important is to
characterize the senses in which such novelty was established at that time, the
transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, a period of so many
transformations, especially in the federal capital of the recently proclaimed Bra-
zilian republic. In this way, the ruptures and discontinuities that those scientists
identified with a “new” medicine must be treated as categories to be under-
stood in their own context. It is certainly very fruitful to recover personages
and experiences prior to the appearance of the Manguinhos Institute. But it is
also the historian’s task to understand just what were the historical meanings
and the consequences of the conviction, proclaimed by the contemporaries and
followers of Oswaldo Cruz, that he (and his colleagues) inaugurated scientific
medicine in Brazil.

The historian Roy MacLeod, in commenting on the work of his professor and
friend George Basalla, pointed out that the model Basalla proposed in 1967
has had consequences far beyond original expectations, opening a vast range
of empirical research on the idea of colonial science. According to MacLeod,
“the more we learn about the processes by which knowledge is diffused across
cultural frontiers, the more problematic those processes become.”49 This obser-

study has been that, in a developing country, the success of a given institution of science
depends upon the solving of a series of political, administrative, educational and research
problems peculiar to countries with limited resources and supports for science.” Stepan,
Beginnings of Brazilian Science, 134.
48. On this point see Dominichi Miranda de Sá, A ciência como profissão: Médicos,
bacharéis e cientistas no Brasil (1895 – 1935) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2006).
49. Roy MacLeod, “The Spread of Western Science Revisited,” in Mundialización de
la ciência y cultura nacional, ed. Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and Maria Luiza Ortega
(Madrid: Editorial Doce Calles, 1993), 736.
 408 HAHR / August / Kropf and Hochman

vation directs us to the similarly well-­worn path of the broadening and institu-
tionalization of the history of science in Latin America, and Brazil in particular,
since the 1980s.
The proliferation of studies and approaches, especially the identification
of new sources for research and the development of new interpretations of
sources that had already been explored, has substantially broadened and made
more complex some of the issues and arguments set forth by Nancy Stepan. The
multiple readings of her book, including the critiques directed at it, have been
fundamental in this process. Beginnings of Brazilian Science is a work to be revis-
ited by those who seek to reflect on a theme as fundamental and complex as the
institutionalization of science in specific historical contexts. At the same time,
Latin Americanists who wish to reflect on this and other themes in the history
of science must consult and enter in dialogue with the vast and diverse academic
literature produced by Latin American scholars in this field.

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