La pericia médico legal como forma de producir la verdad y sus adversarios en los tribunales brasileños de entreguerras

Abstract

The medico-legal examination ensured the existence and the social impact of the biological positivist approaches to criminology that gained influence in Brazil during the interwar period. This examination turned scientific knowledge into accepted and acceptable documents that were also intelligible and useful. Examinations were social currencies used to facilitate the relationship between the power and knowledge of legal medicine and criminology. They disciplined the relationship between law and medicine and made feasible the power of judging. However, along the way they had to assert themselves against other traditions and knowledge. Their main «opponents» were the information obtained by the police from an offense or crime suspect through coercion, especially by means of torture; the decisions made by the jury and the evidence obtained from witnesses; and the delinquent’s knowledge. What all these forms of «truth production» had in common was their non-expert origin, which became the main argument of forensic medical examiners against them. The aim of this article is to discuss the dispute over the prerogatives to produce the truth in institutional spaces that dealt with combating antisocial acts, and to point out the medico-scientific strategies used to prevail over the lay forms present in that shared environment.