“A Change Very Perceptible and Very Oppressive”

Europeans who wrote about Brazil during the colonial period (1500–1822) usually depicted the country as a healthy Eden and an exception to the “torrid zone.” For more than three centuries, a mostly positive impression of health and climate, shared by intellectuals across the Atlantic, influenced colonialism, European rivalries, the slave trade, and early national sentiment. The enduring reputation was ruined suddenly in the mid-nineteenth century by the arrival of new plagues and prejudicial ideas of racial degeneracy. Both the diseases and ideas were infectious, dramatically altering understandings of health and race well into the twentieth century. The rapid change in perception is illustrated by the beliefs of three medical experts, José Francisco Xavier Sigaud, Robert Dundas, and Gustavus Richard Brown Horner. These three men, French-Brazilian, Irish, and American respectively, exemplify the prevalent and transatlantic views of Brazil’s climate held by most medical and scientific men who lived in or studied Brazil. Yet they would revise their opinions dramatically when unfamiliar plagues arrived after 1849. When optimism finally returned in the early twentieth century, it rested on a new understanding of climate and race, but their entangled nature continues to persist.