Emile Brumpt's contribution to the characterization of parasitic diseases in Brazil, 1909-1914

During the first thirty years of the XXth century, parasitologists and epidemiologists who were at the origin of the nosography and etiology of parasitic diseases were faced with several overlapping problems. A person can be infected simultaneoulsy by several different parasites. The delineation of clinical signs is an essential step, in the field and without the help of the laboratory, to identify the various parasitic pathologies and to propose the most likely diagnoses. The use of photography as a nosographic tool enabled the French parasitologist Emile Brumpt (1877-1951) to set up clinical pictures, given the multiplicity of pathologies on a given patient (for instance, goitre and ankylostomiasis, ankylostomiasis and myxoedema, "sylvan" leishmaniasis and palpebral oedema, goitre and Chagas' disease). We will set the paper on a part of Brumpt's photographic archives which he constitued during his missions to South America between 1913 and 1914.