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 condition of conservation.
• Unique piece.
• We would like to thank Simone Kropf and Aline Lopes de Lacerda, researchers at Fiocruz, for their kindness in answering our questions.

Excerpts

(...) I would ask you to be so kind as to inform the President that the banquet for the Head of the Rockefeller Foundation will take place at the Jockey Club.

(...) I would also be very grateful if you would kindly remind the President of my invitation to visit the Department's general hygiene exhibition, an opportunity for His ^Excellency to get to know the services of this department up close and to be able to assess the country's major health problems, those to which the State should pay special attention.

Carlos Chagas , director of the then DNSP (National Department of Public Health), talks to 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 to bid farewell to Lewis Hackett, then head of the Rockefeller Foundation, under the cooperation agreement with the Brazilian government for sanitation and disease control actions in Brazil. Carlos Chagas was also director of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute at the same time. He took the opportunity to invite the president to an exhibition on hygiene organized by the DNSP, which at that time was working to establish rural prophylaxis clinics in the country, within the context of the sanitation movement.

Carlos Chagas (1879 - 1934), a public health physician, scientist and bacteriologist, is known worldwide for having discovered, in 1909, Trypanosoma cruzi - named in honor of 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 from Carlos Chagas, one of the few internationally known Brazilian scientists, rarely appear on the market. This handwritten piece, on the letterhead of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, is of additional interest, since Chagas, then director general of the American-funded National Department of Public Health, comments on the worrying health situation in the country.