Book, Feverish city: tenements and epidemics in the imperial court[LS]

Taking as a starting point the city of Rio de Janeiro and the demolition of its tenement buildings, going through the controversies between infection experts and contagionists surrounding the transmission of yellow fever and the resistance of black communities to the smallpox vaccine, Sidney Chalhoub wrote a "history at the crossroads of many stories." In a passionate and extremely humorous way, Febrile City reinterprets these and other conflicts in the light of social history. The result is a very rich work, which maps the formation of public health policies in Brazil, which, far from being limited to the 19th century, still influence our daily lives with frightening force. 1997 Jabuti Award for Best Essay