Between the Lines of Medicine. Letters and the Construction of Luso-Brazilian Eugenics (1920-1930)

Abstract

This study analyzes unpublished correspondence between Renato Kehl, physician graduated from the Rio de Janeiro Medical School, and António Mendes Correia, physician, anthropologist and professor at the University of Porto, contributing originally to the history of medicine in the Atlantic world. Preserved in archives in Brazil and Portugal, the letters are examined as instruments of prestige, functioning as technologies of governing life, forms of scientific consecration, and mediators of transatlantic circulation. Beyond personal records, they reveal strategies of legitimation and disputes over authority within a field marked by colonial asymmetries. The exchange highlights the ambivalence of Luso-Brazilian eugenics, which combined moral counselling with covert exclusionary projects, challenging the historiographical notion of a “Latin mildness” and offering an original contribution to the historiography of medicine.