6 / 26
ICS
W
O
R
K
I
N
G
P
A
P
E
R
S
2016
RISK AND ONCOLOGICAL MEDICINE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE PORTUGUESE CASE
Abstract
In this paper we aim to describe how the institutionalization of oncological medicine in
Portugal has provided the conditions for a modern configuration of the relation between medicine
and risk, supported by the use of statistical information and by the scientific value of objectivity and
of the individual clinical case.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, cancer has been considered a curable disease, as
long as it was early diagnosed. The appearance of novel medical technologies based on the
production and control of radiations has transformed the methods of diagnosis as well as the
therapeutic action, opening up new forms of perception of the body and a new understanding of
oncological risk.
The hospital archive created by Francisco Gentil in 1915, with its pathological collections and
individual clinical records, may have been one of the most eloquent evidences of a first attempt to
deal with cancer and oncological risk at a national scale. Using a socio-historical approach to the
existing remains of this medical repository, we argue that the development of the modern sanitary
state and of oncological medicine has provided the institutionalization of medicine with some of its
most marking features, which are based in a simultaneously individualized, massified and objective
action upon the individual and the collective body.
The new techniques of diagnosis and therapy, supported by the radiographic images of the
body and by radiotherapy, allowed for the development of modern hospital projects which were
meant to implement more efficient diagnose and therapy techniques and, at the same time, to fight
the increase of cancer incidence in populations through medical research and social action. Based on
a study of the beginnings of cancer studies in Portugal, this paper tries to address the emergence of a
modern form of relation between body, risk and pathology, in a historical context marked by a novel
form of medicine supported by laboratory work and technological advancements.
Keywords:
Anthropology of Science, Oncology, Risk, Medicine, Biopower.
4