Brazil as a Place of Circulation of Soviet Medicine: Doctors and Communist Propaganda during the Cold War

Abstract This article analyzes the circulation of Soviet medicine and public health in Brazil at the beginning of the Cold War. The communist press played a crucial role in this process, and none more so than the journal Atualidades Médicas e Biológicas , which was one of the main means of providing information on advances in Soviet medicine. This periodical, published in Rio de Janeiro between 1951 and 1960, reveals the intellectual project of Brazilian doctors who were communists or sympathizers. Acting as intellectual mediators, they dedicated themselves to selecting, translating and writing medical articles about the ussr health model, emphasized as a more advantageous and effective alternative to the capitalist model of the United States which predominated in Brazil and Latin America. This scientific mediation between the socialist East and the Third World also involved courses and lectures directed at Brazilian physicians on Pavlov’s theories and teachings and socialist medical techniques inspired by the Russian physiologist’s studies. We contend that, by facilitating the circulation of public health ideas from the ussr , these doctors communicated—both to the general public and to their professional peers—their own demands, perspectives on public health and medicine, and their conceptualizations of health and disease within the broader context of development.