Da loucura e de sua história: percursos da construção da classificação psiquiátrica no Brasil de 1910

Abstract

This dissertation aims to problematize the historical context surrounding the development of the 1910 Psychiatric Classification, which resulted from the work of a medical commission established in 1908 within the Brazilian Society of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Legal Medicine. For this research, primary sources included articles from the journal Arquivos Brasileiros de Psiquiatria, Neurologia e Medicina Legal, published between 1908 and 1910. The 1910 Psychiatric Classification is part of the formation of Brazilian medical knowledge about madness, which emerged in a country undergoing a civilizing process at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this context, the study explores the convergences and divergences in medical discourses by looking at the work and different trajectories of the Commission’s members, based on the idea that psychiatry is a science created by individuals in dialogue with the society in which they are embedded. Finally, by questioning how medical knowledge is produced in relation to its producers, this work challenges the idea that knowledge is merely a reproduction of ideas developed in Europe.