The hospital of Gavião in S. Luiz was founded in 1870, to substitute another that was created in 1830. It was administered by the Santa Casa de Misericordia until 15 January 1932, when it passed under Government control.
When Souza-Araújo visited it on 10 February 1933, he considered it one of the worst places he had ever been. “E sordido e tétrico o ambiente. Alli reina a miseria, a indisciplina, o vicio!” [The atmosphere is dirty and horrible. Here reigns misery, unruliness and vice!] He described a large central pavilion in a ruinous state, with a male dormitory to the left and a female one to the right. Patients showed advanced stages of leprosy, in filthy rooms full of flies. Other than the main building, there were around twenty huts, some cleaner than others. In some cases, patients, pigs and dogs were eating from the same containers. Behind the huts was a small wooded area used as a toilet; the pigs and chickens raised by the patients would eat the faeces. It is unclear why the patients did not use the three lavatories in the central square, which Dr Costa Rodrigues had constructed.
The asylum was managed by the Sociedade Beneficiente at the time that Souza-Araújo was writing. While under the management of the Santa Casa, Dr Salvio de Mendonça had been the visiting doctor, and had been attacked and insulted by patients. The current doctor, who only visited occasionally, was Dr Tarquinio Lopes Filho.
There were sixty men and twenty-six women, who left the asylum whenever they chose, especially at night. Prostitutes were visited in the city, or even brought back to the hospital. Patients would beg alms in the city and over the wall of the cemetery in front of the hospital.
Souza-Araújo finishes by saying that the Government spending on this asylum is far too high, considering the discomfort of the patients and the lack of medical assistence.
(Araujo, H C S. ‘Contribuição á epidemiologia e prophylaxia da lepra no norte do Brasil. Mem. Inst. Osw. Cruz, 1933:27 (3) 252-4)
Souza-Araújo’s view of the hospital had not changed three years later, when he wrote that the hospital was an old, dirty asylum with a hundred patients, maintained by the State Government with the co-operation of the Santa Casa and the Sociedade Beneficente that administered the institution.
(Araujo, H C S. ‘A lepra e as organizações anti-leprosas do Brasil em 1936’. Mem. Inst. Osw Cruz, 1937:32, 119)