Gastão Cruls e a auscultação da sociedade brasileira

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate Gastão Cruls (1888-1959), an author of medical short stories and novels in the first half of the 20th century. Through a study of his biography, gathered from documents of his family’s personal collection and his works – specially Coivara (1920), A Amazonia Mysteriosa (1925), Elsa e Helena (1927), Vertigem (1934) e De Pai a Filho (1954) – we aim to reveal polyphonic dimensions of discourse between his historical subject, his fictional work and his own historical period. Our approach is essentially Bakhtinian which allows Gastão Cruls to be a great historiographic object of study considering that he composes a historical personality as the member of an extensive spectrum of social relationships and practices. Metaphorically, we could draw a comparison between him and an intersection point: intertwined with a remarkable visibility in Brazilian intellectual elite, also intersected by plethora of multiple interests and interdisciplinary actor in publishing segments. We observed that the overlapping of his personal, historical and fictitious spheres revealed historical features of the medical training during Rio de Janeiro’s Belle Époque: doctors and patient’s daily routines, human suffering in clinical conditions according to Medicine of his time, the national discussions concerning the future of Brazil and even the inception of psychoanalysis into Brazilian Medicine. Those are the kind of historical issues discussed in his fictitious works