Espaço dos vivos, espaço dos mortos: transformações das atitudes perante a morte na cidade do Rio Grande/RS do século XIX

Abstract

This study aims to verify the process of changes and alterations about the locations of the cemeteries in an urban space and, the ways of diferent burials resulted from new activities towards death in the city of Rio Grande, Rio Grande do Sul. The time frame is the second half of the 19th century, moment in which the new medical-hygienic knowledge was applied, alongside the occurrence of epidemics such as cholera. In 1855, however, the new public cemetery was hastily built to attend the victims of the cholera epidemic. This cemetery, managed by “Santa Casa de Misericórdia”, was the answer that the authorities found to soothe the mind of some social segments and the local press who found in the old Bomfim cemetery, a place of pestilential air (miasmas). In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientific knowledge around the air influenced doctors and sanitary measures at Brazilian cities. The city should obey a logic of sanitizing the air and places of accumulation and stagnation, including burial sites. In Rio Grande, first this sanitary movement acted about the cleaning of the churches, removing the burials from it’s inside and surrounds, and later at the cemetery of Bomfim, which was located close to the center of the city, and finally, at the extramural cemetery.