Race et folie dans la psychiatrie de Juliano Moreira au Brésil (1873-1933)

Abstract

Born in 1872, sixteen years before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, into a poor family in Bahia, Juliano Moreira became at the age of eighteen a doctor and professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Bahia, where he was the colleague and successor of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues. In 1903 he became the head of the Hospital for the Insane in Rio de Janeiro, and remained so until his dismissal by the Getúlio Vargas regime in 1930. During his career, he developed and initiated in his institution important innovations which transformed psychiatric practice in Brazil: alienist reforms, psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry. While sharing throughout the 1920s the eugenics paradigm that ran through the Brazilian medical profession, he was also the one who countered racial factors in psychiatric epidemiology. This article shows that this approach hinges deeply on his own position as a black man in a racist society whose theoretical foundations he never ceased to question.

Keywords

• Juliano Moreira
• psychiatry
• Brazil
• racial theories