| Activity | Georg Carl Adolf Bleyer was born in Hannover, Germany on January 21, 1867. He studied at the Royal Gymnasium 1st Hannover and then at the Royal Technical School of Hannover, in which a degree in natural sciences in 1888. He graduated in medicine at University College London (1891) with a thesis on wildlife ofídica of Germany, a study that earned him an invitation to join the congregation of the lens that university.
Bleyer was deeply influenced by reading the books of the German naturalist Karl von den Steinen (1855-1929), the first scholar to record the habits and customs of the native peoples of Central Brazil. Steinen had made two expeditions to the Xingu River in the 1880s, leaving a broad and ethnographic mapping of the region. Spurred by reports of Steinen, Bleyer, who won as a graduation gift a trip to India and South America, arrived in Brazil in 1892. After visiting the places visited by Steinen, eventually settling in Blumenau, Santa Catarina.
Jorge Bleyer was one of the pioneers of tropical medicine, anthropology and archeology in Brazil, having played key role in the establishment of sanitation in Santa Catarina. He worked initially as a clinician at the hospital in Blumenau and care to residents of the city and its neighboring regions. When visiting the sick, he tried to disseminate hygiene principles that was used in modern sanitation in Europe. He was particularly concerned with the transmission of disease by microbes and their dissemination by insects.
In 1900, he described in the journal of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Hamburg the fatal case of a woman victimized by the destruction of the eye by fly larvae. Five years later, Bleyer published a study on myiasis, a disease commonly known as screwworm, transmitted by horseflies. For this work, he was appointed corresponding member of the National Academy of Medicine in September 1905.
In 1907 he published an article in The Courier Lajeano alerting the public about ways of preventing various diseases, especially leprosy. Although a supporter of the thesis contagionists believed, perhaps under the influence of Adolpho Lutz - one of its main partners in Brazil - that the disease could be transmitted by an insect host. In 1919, Bleyer was the first to identify Chagas disease in Santa Catarina, and was author of the health regulation that would gauge the performance of the Inspectorate for Hygiene in the state. In his work as health officer, he led the fight against outbreaks of smallpox, typhoid and even the Spanish flu.
Bleyer was also an advocate of the indigenous people cause. Of his activity as an ethnologist, his reearch resulted in substantial work on the various diseases that afflicted the native populations and the origin of our earliest inhabitants. In 1903, he visited at the request of Steinen, the village of Kaingang, Palmas, Parana. There, then, that children Kaingang had the same bluish spot which, according to Baez, characterized the Mongolian race, and that might explain the origin of American man. In 1904, he published a study on the Indians encouraged botocudos. As a doctor of the Railroad Sao Paulo-Rio Grande do Sul, a position he held from 1905 to 1908, made the acquaintance of several indigenous communities remaining.
Various expeditions brought together the evidence sought to help explain the origin of man in Brazil. As an evolutionist, he was in favor of the argument that America would have been inhabited originally by a "race" primitive, years later, would have merged with the people who emigrated from Asia and other regions.
Several of his numerous archaeological finds, which include parts of human fossils and artifacts different individuals, were donated to scientific institutions in Brazil and Europe, for example, the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, the Natural History Museum of London and Royal School of Medicine in Dublin. Many of his investigations remain unpublished, awaiting publication. |