Digging out the Monsenhor Lefort studies center: sanitary policies for disesase control according to newspapers from the early twentieth century

Abstract

This paper aims to disclose the research held at the Centro de Estudos Monsenhor Lefort (Monseigneur Lefort Studies Center), an archive located in the city of Campanha, in the southern state of Minas Gerais. The activities carried out were data gathering and critical analysis of the sources belonging to the Centre’s collection of press documents. Applying textual analysis and con­sidering the documents in its historicity, we analyzed the sanitary policies for disease control, and the representation of diseases in newspapers from the first decades of the twentieth century. We observed primarily the political role of journalism in that historical moment and its intention to standardize the behavior through universalization of political and economic values of the dominant classes.