“They want to starve”: doctors and “beasts” in the dietetics of the Hospital de Caridade Juvino Barreto in Natal (1909-1927)

Abstract

This article aims to discuss some aspects of institutional feeding at the Hospital de Caridade Juvino Barreto (HCJB), in the city of Natal, between 1909, the date of the creation of the hospital, and 1927, when its administration passed into the hands of the Hospital Assistance Society (HAS). Exploring diverse documentary sources (hospital archives, press articles, medical memoirs, messages from government authorities), we seek to understand the process of constituting a “hospital dietetics” at HCJB in the first three decades of the 20th century, analyzing, for this, the relationship between doctors and patients based on the dietary practices in the hospital, which led us to examine the “spatialities of eating” within the institution (kitchen, cafeteria, wards), the body of agents responsible for the production, circulation and consumption of food, medical-dietary prescriptions and the behavior of patients facing these dietary regimes. The study pointed out that the disciplining of the HCJB dietary regime had to be built on the difficult relationship between the determination of medical theory, aspects of the local economy and food habits of the population, often producing conflicts in institutional and institutional food arrangements, and, consequently, in medical therapy itself.