“In close contact with nature”: education, health and labor at the School Hospital José de Mendonça

ABSTRACT This study aims to examine the practices of the School Hospital José de Mendonça, founded in the late 1930s in the city Araruama, in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro. With structures and activities marked by medical and educational reasons, the school first gathered children of public Rio de Janeiro schools, who suffered from treatable or curable diseases. This institution exposed the children to formal education, labor, and physical practices guided by natural medicine - for example, sea and sunbathing, exposure to sun, and sea air were used during treatment. The goals of the school-hospital, conceived as a counterpoint to busy and harmful city life, articulated with the belief in a nature that can restore, relieve, and invigorate. The discourses of the creator, Doctor Oscar Clark, offer clues about the bigger picture in which the initiative is inscribed: a modern project, defended by fractions of the Brazilian social thought, which had as cornerstones the cure of a people considered sick, whose redemption was literacy, labor and practices of body education.