Sacramento Blake, the military doctor who studied nostalgia and did not want the nationalization of the Army in the 19th century

Abstract

Sacramento Blake, before working on the famous dictionary, was a military doctor. He traveled around the country, produced reports for the public administration making diagnoses and published a book analyzing the situations of the armed forces in Brazil. In this article, I seek to understand this stage in the illustrated doctor's trajectory to recover his contribution to the debate on the nationalization of the Brazilian Army in the 1850s and 1860s; he framed the problem based on his experience with soldiers in barracks and on the battlefields and proposed solutions that diverged from what was practiced, thus explaining other proposals and expectations for the organization of the army in Brazil; his writings focused on the physical and mental health of soldiers and the diagnoses sought to support proposals for a radical reformulation of the institution; Many doctors participated in public life in the 19th century, we know little about what those who joined the Brazilian army said. I used the handwritten reports sent by the doctor to the government when he was in Alagoas, the book Estudos Militares published in 1865, the newspaper he edited in 1849 and the biographical profiles published in the Revista do IHGB (Journal of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute), in addition to the press, government correspondence from the period and documentation from the Army Archive on Blake.