Handwritten letter from Carlos Chagas (1923)

Scientist Carlos Chagas invites President Artur Bernardes to the Rockefeller Foundation banquet and draws attention to the country's health problems.

Handwritten letter from Carlos Chagas to Edmundo da Veiga, with the word "urgent" in red. 2 pages. In Portuguese. 16.9 cm x 22.6 cm. February 27, 1923, probably in Rio de Janeiro. Good state. We would like to thank Simone Kropf and Aline Lopes de Lacerda, researchers at Fiocruz, for their kindness in answering our questions. Single piece.

extracts

(...) I ask you to kindly inform Mr. President that the banquet for the Chief of the Rockefeller Foundation will take place at the Jockey Club.

(...) I will still be very grateful to you for the courtesy of reminding Mr. President of my invitation to visit the Department's general hygiene exhibition, an opportunity for His ^Excellency to get to know the department's services up close and to be able to assess the country's major health problems, those on which the attention of the State.

Carlos Chagas , director of the then DNSP (National Department of Public Health), talks with Edmundo Veiga, from the Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic during the government of Artur Bernardes (1922-1926), about inviting the president to a banquet, probably for a farewell Lewis Hackett, then head of the Rockefeller Foundation, in the cooperation agreement with the Brazilian government for sanitation actions and combating endemic diseases present in Brazil. Carlos Chagas was also director of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in the same period. He took the opportunity to invite the president to an exhibition on hygiene organized by the DNSP, which at that time was committed to establishing rural prophylaxis posts in the country, in the context of the health movement.

Carlos Chagas (1879 - 1934), public health physician, scientist and bacteriologist, is known worldwide for having discovered, in 1909, Trypanosoma cruzi - named after his friend Oswaldo Cruz - the causative agent of Chagas disease. On two occasions, in 1911 and 1920, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Letters by Carlos Chagas, one of the few internationally known Brazilian scientists, rarely appear on the market. This piece, handwritten and with the letterhead of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, is of additional interest, since Chagas, then director general of the National Department of Public Health, funded by the Americans, comments on the worrying health situation in the country.