Sob a mira de um bacamarte : a loucura debatida no alvorecer da República

• Autor(a) principal: Mastrantonio, Bruno de Oliveira [UNIFESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Trabalho de conclusão de curso
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNIFESP
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.unifesp.br/handle/11600/67664
• topic: Mental Illnes; Alienism; Literature; Loucura; Alienismo; Literatura

By the end of the eighteen century, the madness earned the status of mental illness capable of being cured under the care of a medical specialty that has just born: the Alienism, profession which arrived in Brazil at the 1880s, a consensus in the historiography regarding the subject. A period of crisis and change, flagged by Brazil's debut into modernity, the alienist's speech would use his own knowledge specificities as a deadly weapon to fight the poverty, which haunted ideals of morality and good manners of the new urban bourgeoisie. In this sense, this research aims to analyze the debates developed on the theme of Madness, from the formation of the medical alienist knowledge in Brazil, in a process of changing nominated here as the dawn of the Republic. For this end, we put in evidence two sets of documents of different nature: O Alienista, by Machado de Assis, written between late 1881 and early 1882; excerpts of Esboço de psiquiatria forense (1904) and Fragmentos de psiquiatria (1895), both written by alienist doctor Franco da Rocha. The confrontation between the two writers is revealing in the sense which, through the formation of a specialized knowledge, voices are raised in order to question the arbitrariness of their power.