A enfermagem e a aliança da Igreja com o Estado: Escola de Enfermeiras Luiza de Marillac

Abstract

This is a sociohistorical study which object is the Associação São Vicente de Paulo‘s (ASVP) movement favoring the Escola de Enfermeiras Luiza de Marillac’s (Luiza de Marillac School of Nurses – EELM) creation and equating. The time frame is the period from 1931 to 1942, starting with the publication of the Decree n. 20.109/31 and ending with the EELM’s equating to the Escola Anna Nery. Primary sources: documents from the Daughters of Charity Company files, from PUC/RJ, from FELM/SC, from EEAN/UFRJ and EE UFMG’s Documentations Centers, and also the testimony of former EELM’s students and teachers. The microanalysis made the understanding of the existent interfaces between the religious and the political fields possible as well as between both health and Nursing education fields. Studying this research’s findings, I considered the dialectical movement between macro and micro social structures in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts. Thus, I understood that with the publication of the Decree n. 20.109/31, Brazilian Nursing, which was exercised mainly by nuns without an academic education, had its panorama significantly changed. That decree threatened the Church’s position in hospital areas, arousing a movement in the Congregations to give their Sisters a title, having the ASVP been the first one to do it. The Sisters of Charity’s institutionalized capital acquisition made the EELM’s creation possible. The EELM is a nurses’ diffuser center, ruled by Catholicism at a national level.