The scorching tropics: fevers and public health in Brazil during the Joanine period, 1808-1821.

Although fevers (with the exception of yellow fever) have not yet been fully explored by the historiography of Brazilian health, they were almost inevitable in nineteenth-century Brazilian society, affecting huge portions of the population. Their victims suffered from a wide variety of symptoms, and identification and treatment of these symptoms were the object of intense debates in medical circles. The Luso-Brazilian intelligentsia considered European medical debates as well as their own clinical experiences and attempted to provide answers in a flurry of publications. Even so, the manifestations of fever in the tropics presented a challenge that lay beyond their European training, forcing them to combine experiences acquired in different parts of the Empire to comprise specific knowledge on tropical fevers.