Narratives on the beginning of speech therapy services in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

The introduction of courses in Speech Therapy (ST) in the State of Bahia dates from 1999. Although the courses are recent, the history of this practice in Salvador is more distant and in many ways articulates the concerns that have marked the ST. In order to present this history, this article presents narratives of the first speech therapists in the city of Salvador, seeking in their experiences a source for understanding the profession's past and present, as well as its future projections. The gathering of narratives was made using Oral History methodology, that is, the story is told by its own actors. Narrators' voices frame ST in Salvador as a unique event which is, at the same time, characteristic of how the area has been constituted in Brazil. They distinguish features such as the prevalence of private speech therapy practices as a result of misguided public policies; the recognition by patients as the primary form of publicity for the professionals and local contribution to the institutionalization. Interviewees spoke about the first practices related to the education of deaf and mentally disabled patients, and also about an experience of a holistic clinic, which did not want to prescribe, where people worked together, living the experience of the encounter: a clinic that recognized that singularity was organized in each person beyond the record of the lived experience, open to the sentiment, to reciprocity for all human aspiration: to be included, to be taken care of.