Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa: As ciências geológicas no Brasil: Uma história social e

institucional, 1875–1934
As ciências geológicas no Brasil: Uma história social e institucional, 1875–1934 by
Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa
Review by: rev. by Adolfo Olea‐Franco
Isis, Vol. 96, No. 4 (December 2005), pp. 663-664
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 4 (2005)
demicians’ attempts to wrest control of the study
of mental illness from the community of alienists
who directed the mental asylums located in the
German countryside. Engstrom pays consider-
able attention to Wilhelm Griesinger, best
known for his view of mental illness as brain
disease. In one of the book’s strongest chapters,
Engstrom demonstrates how Griesinger’s reform
agenda, which defined academic psychiatry as
the study of the neuropathology of the brain in
university laboratories, emerged through a com-
plex process that reflected sociopolitical con-
cerns, professional practices, turf battles, and lo-
cal circumstances. Engstrom continues his story
through later disillusionment with Griesinger’s
program, especially as it failed to produce any
therapeutic improvements. With his focus on
Emil Kraepelin, Engstrom charts the university
community’s shift from promises of therapeutic
success to diagnosis and prophylaxis, a shift that
also signaled a move from the laboratory back
to the clinic. Engstrom’s story ends in the early
twentieth century, by which time psychiatry had
become fully integrated into the German univer-
sity system. Not only did clinics and polyclinics
abound, but by 1901 all medical students were
required to take clinical courses and be examined
in psychiatry in order to meet the state licensing
requirements.
Within this narrative structure, Engstrom tells
a number of different stories, moving back and
forth between social and cultural transforma-
tions, changing professional practices, shifting
architectural spaces, jurisdictional disputes, and
local circumstances. The result is a finely argued
book that stands as a corrective to studies that
have reduced psychiatric knowledge and prac-
tices to tools of the state, intent upon disciplining
deviance. While acknowledging the power em-
bedded in a discipline that has as its goal the
definition of normalcy, Engstrom insists on two
caveats: psychiatrists expressed deep ambiva-
lence about their relationship with the state, and
the history of psychiatry involved more catego-
ries of players than just these two. Thus in his
hands the university psychiatric clinic becomes
an entity shaped not only by the profession’s un-
derstanding of mental illness, the state’s need to
control deviance, or the collusion between the
two, but, as well, by decades of negotiations be-
tween a number of entities—academics, alien-
ists, health and welfare administrators, univer-
sity officials, and, to some extent, patients and
their families—all of whom were vying to define
and protect their own interests.
If the book has any flaw it is that at times it
seems insular. Engstrom too often assumes fa-
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663
miliarity on the part of his reader with German
history of psychiatry; indeed, many of his his-
toriographical criticisms are aimed at authors of
texts known primarily to the small community
of scholars working in this field. The appeal of
this book could have been broadened by drawing
comparisons to developments in other countries
or, at the very least, to developments in other
branches of medicine in the German university.
To what extent, for example, did psychiatry’s
path to success mirror the trajectory of other
medical disciplines, and to what extent did it dif-
fer? And to what extent was this a story peculiar
to Germany?
This criticism aside, Clinical Psychiatry in
Imperial Germany should be read by anyone in-
terested in nineteenth-century German history of
medicine and science, the history of modern psy-
chiatry, and the history of the professions. Well
written and cogently argued, it is a fine addition
to Cornell’s series on the history of psychiatry.
ARLEEN MARCIA TUCHMAN
Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa. As
ciências geológicas no Brasil: Uma história so-
cial e institucional, 1875–1934. (Série História
da Ciência e da Tecnologia.) 270 pp., illus., bibl.,
index. Sao Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1997.
Silvia Figueirôa traces a deeply interesting pic-
ture of the birth and development of the insti-
tutional structures and practices of the geological
sciences in Brazil in the period from 1875 to
1934; she also devotes almost a third of the book
to elucidating the early growth of these disci-
plines in the preceding hundred years.
The text is based on original research in di-
verse primary sources, some of which are studied
here for the first time, as well as on a clear syn-
thesis of scholarly research on the issues at hand.
One of the most important virtues of the book is
the illuminating theoretical and methodological
framework Figueirôa adopted in doing research
on the history of science in a Latin American
country. She shows, against diffusionism, that
the local context was more influential in shaping
geological sciences than the tenets of this school
would have us believe. Countering the exagger-
ated emphasis on the role of the state in the crea-
tion of scientific institutions, she argues con-
vincingly that many initiatives stemmed from
creative individuals who understood what the
national growth of geological teaching and re-
search demanded. But rather than denying the
importance of scientific diffusionism, Figueirôa
holds that its results depended strongly on the
participation of the local elites, whose achieve-
664 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 4 (2005)
ments were usually dismissed by foreign geol-
ogists (though they often depended on the sup-
port of their Brazilian colleagues). She also
insists that although the state was essential in the
development of the sciences, it was not the
source of all initiatives. Its true merit, at times,
was simply that it reacted favorably to Brazilian
scholars’ ideas. Figueirôa conceives the growth
of geological institutions, disciplines, practices,
teachers, and individual or collective research as
the result of a multicausal process in which a
number of factors (national and international,
private and public, emphasis on applied and fun-
damental knowledge, etc.) intermingled in ways
that are not easily explained by any monocausal
approach.
She identifies three different phases in the in-
stitutionalization of geological sciences in Bra-
zil. The first phase, the only one defined by an
external reality, started in 1808, with the move
of the Portuguese Crown—and unfinished En-
lightenment projects—to Rio de Janeiro. Three
decades later, there was much discussion on how
to develop a national science. In the second
phase, which began in 1870 under the influence
of the theory of evolution and positivist philos-
ophy, as well as the impact of the ongoing sec-
ond European industrial revolution, institutions
where geological sciences were present ex-
panded and the first institutions devoted primar-
ily to these disciplines were founded. Many geo-
logical surveys were carried out; museum
collections were gathered, classified, and im-
proved; and the professional education of mining
engineers and geologists advanced. The third
phase began in 1907; by 1934, the institution-
alization of the geological sciences, with an em-
phasis on applied research, would be complete.
Development of the geological sciences was
subordinated, curiously enough, to the develop-
ment of agriculture—more specifically, to the
growth of coffee, once the biggest Brazilian ex-
port.
In spite of the social history of science ap-
proach Figueirôa adopts, it seems to me that in
some of her presentations the social and intel-
lectual developments appear side by side, or
overlapped; they do not seem to interact in a re-
ciprocal fashion, to determine each other. An-
other point I would have liked her to address is
comparative. How did the particular history of
Brazil, as compared to the somewhat different
trajectories of the other Latin American coun-
tries, make a difference to the way the sciences
developed there? For instance, in the aftermath
of the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Pen-
insula, almost all of Spain’s colonies started
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fighting for their independence, while Brazil, in
contrast, became the seat of the Portuguese
Crown. Similarly, in the 1910s, while Mexico
was undergoing a decade-long revolution, Brazil
seemed to progress peacefully. Nowadays, Bra-
zil has the largest population of African descent
in the Americas. Did these and other historical
and social factors shape Brazilian sciences in
identifiable ways?
This book is an excellent, original contribu-
tion, and Silvia Figueirôa both answers the ques-
tions she has raised and stimulates her readers to
pose new problems.
ADOLFO OLEA-FRANCO
Peter Galison. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s
Maps: Empires of Time. 389 pp., figs., bibl., in-
dex. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. $23.95
(cloth).
The strength of Peter Galison’s book lies in the
fact that, while written in a rigorous style, it re-
mains accessible to a wide audience. It is a rare
example of an intellectually uncompromising
work that is not reserved for specialists.
The book can be described as a double biog-
raphy of Henri Poincaré and Albert Einstein ar-
ticulated around the central theme of modernity,
around the importance of measuring time, and
the material mastery of communication technol-
ogies, in the context of the second industrial rev-
olution. Galison does not present Einstein and
Poincaré as pure intellects debating the electro-
dynamics of moving bodies, the former using his
genius to revolutionize science and the latter
doggedly resisting this innovation. Of course, he
emphasizes that both were innovative, possess-
ing real intellectual agency—that they were not
simply “cultural dopes.” In trying to reconcile
complex intellectual demands, they demon-
strated that they had true depth as individuals,
and Galison succeeds in bringing out their in-
ventiveness and the fascinating solutions they
proposed. This book does, however, present Ein-
stein and Poincaré resolutely as individuals of
their time, marked by their education, modeled
by the social world they inhabit, defined by their
daily practices and by the very materiality of
their physical and institutional universes. In or-
der to understand Einstein, Galison shows that
we need to follow up that mere fact that every
historian of physics has been aware of without
investigating any further: that Einstein was
working in the patent office in Berne. There, he
was largely concerned with the synchronization
of clocks, and Galison demonstrates that it is not
unreasonable to suppose that this work was a