Médicos…

Estive a ler o livro:
DOCTORS, FOLK MEDICINE AND THE INQUISITION
The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment
de TIMOTHY D. WALKER
2005
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Diz ele:
Significantly, I have found that this period of witchcraft persecution
in Portugal coincided with a time when university-trained physicians
and surgeons, or médicos, were entering the paid ranks of the
Inquisition in unprecedented numbers, taking up employment as
familiares (non-ecclesiastical employees of the Holy Office who often
identified deviant members of society as potential subjects for an
Inquisition investigation) to enjoy the enhanced status and privileges
consequent to holding such a post.
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Mas o mais importante é isto:
I contend that state-licensed physicians
and surgeons, motivated by professional competition […], used
their positions within the Holy Office to initiate trials against purveyors
of folk remedies.
Therefore, I believe that the persecution of curandeiros and saludadores
reveals a conflict between learned medical culture and popular
healing culture in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Portugal.

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Em conclusão, suspeito que a actual ordem dos médicos seja a herdeira directa desta linha de actuação.

Assim se explica a falta de vontade em abrir mais cursos e vagas em Medicina, e em ter de importar médicos de Cuba e outras paragens.

– – –
Este não é um país pobre. É antes um país mal gerido.

– – –
Também afirma:
CHAPTER EIGHT
PUNISHING MAGICAL CRIMINALS: MILD CUSTOMS
(BRANDOS COSTUMES ) AND SOCIAL CONTROL
For all of the diligence of Portugal’s inquisitors and familiares in bringing
popular healers and other mágicos to trial during the Enlightenment
era, the Holy Office’s treatment of convicted magical criminals was
comparably light. Indeed, relative clemency is the salient feature of
Portugal’s “witch hunting” experience in the eighteenth century. The
Inquisition publicly humiliated sorcerers, witches, diviners and illicit
superstitious healers and drove them away from their homes to live
in exile under very difficult circumstances, but it almost never had
them killed. Certainly by the standards of other European regions
during the previous three centuries, when being found guilty of a
magical crime generally meant suffering some form of capital punishment,
Portuguese sentences, lethal in only the rarest of circumstances,
were comparatively benign.
Curiously, this was almost as true in the sixteenth century as it
was in the eighteenth;
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Ou seja: O problema com a justiça não é de agora.

Dá que pensar. Se Portugal é um país mal gerido (em termos tecnocráticos), ou se Portugal é um país que sabe gerir a sua especificidade sem sucumbir às certezas tecnocráticas em moda na época…