A Trajetória de Joaquim Fernandes Venâncio: ator social invisível da ciência

Abstract

This article presents a historical account of the career of Joaquim Venâncio Fernandes, an invisible social actor in science, who worked as a laboratory assistant for thirty-five years at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute at the beginning of the 20th century. Most of the time, Joaquim Venâncio worked with the researchers Dr. Adolpho and Dr. Bertha Lutz and is cited as a direct collaborator in most of their discoveries, although there are records that he also accompanied other researchers, including foreigners visiting Brazil. Although he had little formal education, Joaquim Venâncio was extremely competent and had an enviable knowledge of zoology. He was credited with the first ideas on pregnancy testing, based on the inoculation of female urine in Rhinella marina frogs. Researchers Adolpho and Bertha Lutz acknowledged the importance of Venâncio's collaboration in their discoveries, citing him directly in some of their articles and naming one of the amphibian species they discovered after him. In line with various studies which point out that certain historical approaches to science allow scientific knowledge to be constructed in a contextualized way, the accounts presented in this article are seen as a possibility for use in the classroom, which could spark debate on issues of gender, race and power relations, which are present in the process of constructing scientific knowledge to this day, thus contributing to a more representative education in science, with a view to training citizens who fight for greater social justice.