Um antro de doenças: guerra, cotidiano e condições de saúde no Recife holandês (1630-1654)

Abstract

This article aims to present, in the form of a historiographic review, the daily life of the population of Recife during the Dutch occupation in the North of Brazil, specifically dealing with the city’s health conditions between 1630 and 1654. The study focuses on the area chosen to host the local government of the West Indies Company, where problems related to environmental degradation, potentiators of diseases among the inhabitants, hinder to maintain the population’s healthy. This state of affairs was influenced by the choice for the estuarine zone, where commercial operations were already carried out and the main infrastructures for this purpose were already in place (seaport and warehouses). The negative factors which the elected area offered the population, such as the maintenance of salubrious conditions to the detriment of the military defense, stood out especially after the end of the administration of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen in 1644. The analysis tries to relate occurrences of diseases, epidemic or non-epidemic, in the invading population already deprived of food and other supplies during the long insurrectionary period. In the last eight years of Dutch occupation, the reductions of the occupied territories and the concentration of population in the urban area of the Company's local headquarters, caused a loss of salubrious conditions for the resident population, and the casualties ended up potentializing the loss of resistance capacity by the occupants.