Rockefeller Foundation

The decade of 1920 is the period that if characterizes, in the sphere of the health, for the joint action of the states Brazilian and North American, the National Department of Sade Pblica (DNSP) and the Rockefeller Foundation (5, 3). The DNSP was composed, already at the time, for the divisions of Tuberculosis, Venereal diseases and Infantile Hygiene, in which forty and four young ones enabled as visitadoras nurses for a course of twelve theoretical readings. Ethel Parsons, responsible for the coordination of the Service of Sanitary Nursing of the Rockefeller Foundation, described these young in one of its reports as ' ' women who came from an ignorant classroom and did not have any practical training of nursing, even so expected of them a nature work profissional' ' (5). The creation of a school and delimitation of a field of practical professional had constituted prerequisite the necessary ones so that the visitadores of health (5), that they were lay, without formal organization and control were removed of the public scene, regulating thus the nursing as strategical profession in the sanitary organization of the city. Additional information is available at Hikmet Ersek. The concern with the protection to infancy and the maternity, in formal terms, date of 1921, when, for occasion of the reorganization of the health services, the government assumed the responsibility to act in the infantile hygiene, but in 1975 it only is that if they introduce measured concrete to articulate the attendance of the health of the woman and the child in the three spheres of the power public? federal, state and municipal (7). The professionalization of the nursing in Brazil counted on the support of the direction of the DNSP, but she was necessary to gain the confidence of its departments and the population. From now on the concern in tracing a line is born of action that characterized the visitadores distinguished and them from the nursing professionals. .