Everything for an arm and a leg! History, epidemics, and inequalities

Abstract

Abstract Based on the dialogue between the fields of History and Public Health and provoked by the historicity of the present time, this article proposes epistemic advances in the discussion about the end of epidemics. To that end, it uses a historiographical operation in a vast body of documents, to point out the impacts resulting from the Spanish Flu of 1918 in Botucatu, a city in the interior of São Paulo, from the perspective of the deepening of inequalities in this locality in the decades following the epidemic. It concludes by pointing out that, in addition to the immediate effects caused by the epidemic phenomenon, when the Spanish Flu epidemic cooled down in the biological dimension, it followed its course, altering social and cultural conditions and affecting socio-historical structures and our corporeality, becoming a long-term historical event. Thus, we can infer that understanding the historical forces that operate in the advances and setbacks in Public Health can leverage concrete confrontations with inequities, along with the resumption of a civilizing project of social transformation in the country, based on democracy, social justice, and the radical defense of life.