Loucura, gênero e raça: o discurso psiquiátrico na Revista Médica de S. Paulo (1898 1914)

Abstract

This research investigated the discourse produced about madness in the Revista Médica de S. Paulo [São Paulo's Medical Journal]: a practical journal of Medicine, Surgery, and Hygiene, which circulated in the state of São Paulo between 1898 and 1914, also reaching other cities in Brazil and abroad. This medical journal, along with other specialized periodicals, medical-sanitary institutions, and scientific events, was an important object of the São Paulo medical community and played a relevant role in the organization and strengthening of the category, in the fight for the regulation of the profession, in medical-legal disputes against jurists and the foundation of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of São Paulo (1912). At that historical moment, doctors sought the legitimization of their authority in the methods and therapies applied to sick individuals and, preventively, to the population in general, in an attempt to mold a productive and docile nation that would help the consolidation of the Brazilian national state. From the selection of all publications that concerned Psychiatry, Neurology, Forensic Medicine, and Psychology in the Revista Médica de S. Paulo, three key themes emerged -"Hospice and alienation"; "Gender and sexuality"; "Race, crime and laws"and, based on these clippings, categories of analysis in which the publications were described and stitched together. The methodology used was inspired by critical historiography, especially the method of investigating historical logic proposed by Thompson (1978Thompson ( /1981, and applied linguistic tools suggested by Krieg-Planque (2012) for the discourse analysis exercise done in selected publications. The unfolded hypothesis is that the psychiatric discourse in the journal was structured on a moral evaluation of social behaviors considered deviant, based on a standard of normality anchored in the invention of a bourgeois nuclear family model, of scientific racism, and of an inexorably capitalist society in which rich and poor, white and black, men and women should reproduce prescribed, abstract and ahistorical, hierarchically unequal social roles. Doctors, thus, set themselves as a model to produce a universal truth about bodies, behaviors and subjectivities of individuals, families, groups and populations, structuring, in the Paulist medical discourse, a paradigm of rationality that created, at the same time, its opposite: the savage, the insane, the degenerate. Throughout the First Republic, Medicine competed with Law for social prestige and political power to be able to deliberate on issues concerning public administration and control of the national social body, seeking to disqualify other healing practices linked to popular knowledge and to submit other health professions to its authority, to make its way into the scientific priesthood.