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 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 kindly ask you 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 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 properly assess the major health problems of the country, those on which the State should especially focus its attention.
Carlos Chagas , director of the then DNSP (National Department of Public Health), discusses with Edmundo Veiga, from the Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic during the government of Artur Bernardes (1922-1926), the invitation to the president for a banquet, probably a farewell for 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 during the same period. He takes the opportunity to invite the president to an exhibition on hygiene organized by the DNSP, which at that time was engaged in establishing rural prophylaxis posts in the country, within the context of the sanitation movement.
Carlos Chagas (1879 - 1934), a physician, public health expert, scientist, and bacteriologist, is known worldwide for discovering, in 1909, Trypanosoma cruzi – named in honor of his friend Oswaldo Cruz – the causative agent of Chagas disease. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine on two occasions, in 1911 and 1920.
Letters from Carlos Chagas, one of the few Brazilian scientists known internationally, rarely appear on the market. This particular piece, handwritten and on the letterhead of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, presents an 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.
