A natureza degenerante: o Brasil de Hipócrates

Abstract

In the 18th century, Guilielmus Piso arrives in Brazil as the archiater in the court of John Maurice of Nassau. Upon his return to Europe, he takes on the task of writing a descriptive treatise of these Western Indies. For this purpose, he makes use of the mental framework bequeathed by his education, setting up therefore the treatise On Airs, Waters and Places about Brazil. In the same manner and by the same means found in the homonymous treatise of the Corpus Hippocraticum, and fortified by the authority of Latin (and Galenic) tradition, Piso undertakes an analysis of the man from this Land and his customs, taking as the axis of the “anthropological” part of his treatise the relation between a conception of nature that is merely an interpretation of the Hippocratic φύσις and the indolent ἦθος, which, by its turn, gave birth to a long-term imaginary lasting until the 21st century.