This analysis of the history of the Laboratório de Biologia Infantil (Children's Biology Laboratory) discusses topics related to childhood and adolescence published in the Arquivos de Medicina Legal e Identificação do Rio de Janeiro. It underscores the political-institutional and intellectual contexts that prompted the 1930s debate about childhood among physicians, teachers, educators, and politicians, with a special focus on Leonídio Ribeiro, founder and first editor of the journal. The Laboratório inaugurated a medical and scientific routine for studying, treating, and providing assistance within institutions that had been created to repress, care for, and cure, and as such it represented an important chapter in the history of so-called abandoned and delinquent childhood.
Laboratório de Biologia Infantil; forensic medicine; Leonídio Ribeiro (1893- 1976); history; Brazil
