Identity in question – medical memories of the school of medicine of Bahia: fiction or history?

Abstract

Since Aristotle, history and fiction dialogue, although the commitments of both are otherwise distinct. This paper proposes a debate about the unstable limits between history and fiction, discussing the theoretical and methodological challenges of the creation of paradigms for the interpretation of reality. Medical memories of the school of medicine of Bahia is configured as narratives that question the limits between history and literature. Produced in the XIX and XX centuries and narrated by professors of the university, the memories appear as narratives that allow considering the relativity of “truth” found in them, since they are built on subjectivity. The reality that is narrated is organized by the memory of the historian, which transforms it in text. In this case, the historian is putted together with the writer that, in a disordered field of the real, also attempts to give meaning to the facts.