At the beginning of the 20th century, the city of Rio de Janeiro was the federal capital of Brazil. The republican government decided to carry out a reform in the city on three fronts: the modernization of the port, urban reform and urban sanitation. In addition to these reforms, several campaigns were carried out against the diseases that constantly infected the population.
In this text, we will emphasize the fight against diseases in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the first decade of the 20th century (1901-1910). But, specifically, we will analyze the fight against the transmitting agent of the bubonic plague, the rat flea. To fight the rat flea, it was necessary to fight the rats. Thus, the government of Rio de Janeiro, represented by the Director General of Public Health, the physician and sanitarist Oswaldo Cruz, carried out a campaign to hunt rats. In that historical context, the 'rats were worth gold', as, according to the medicine of the period, the main form of transmission of bubonic plague (the Black Death of the Middle Ages) was the flea present in rats, which, in contact with humans, became the main transmitting agent of the disease.
In different parts of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Oswaldo Cruz set up several rat-killer brigades and set the goal of each volunteer, or resident of the city, to eliminate five rats a day. The citizen who managed to eliminate eight rats would receive 300 reis from the government for each animal above the quota (so, in this example, the person would earn 900 reis from the government for the three rats above the quota).
The goals stipulated by Oswaldo Cruz were adapted according to different realities. Unemployed people, bohemians and rogues made real rat breeding sites (mainly the rogues, who specialized in breeding mice, which were later sold to the government).
Thus, the measures stipulated by Oswaldo Cruz, which aimed to extinguish the population of rats from the Rio de Janeiro, almost ended up proliferating more rats throughout the city, because rats have an enormous capacity to procreation.
The creation of rats carried out by the population was discovered by public authorities. Several people were arrested, but several others made money from the sale of rats. In this way, we perceive unusual facts that make up the history of Brazil. As we have seen, since the beginning of the 20th century, the Brazilian population needed and still needs a lot of creativity to survive in this country.
Leandro Carvalho
Master in History
