Crimes of Passion and Psychiatry in Early Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

This article examines how early twentieth-century crime of passion trials constructed medical insanity and criminal responsibility by litigating varied interpretations of masculine decision making. Specifically, it looks at how defense lawyers used and applied psychiatric knowledge to their clients' benefit and how psychiatrists, in turn, (re)asserted control over that knowledge by condemning its misuse. The way that these medico-legal narratives played out in the courtroom during crime of passion trials, and in the public discourses that surrounded them, ultimately brought a smoldering competition between distinct understandings of modern masculinity into sharp focus.

Reasoning against madness: psychiatry and the state in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944 / Rochester Studies in Medical History

This book examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry, looking at how its practitioners fashioned themselves as the key architects in the project of national regeneration. The book's narrative involves a cast of varied characters in an unstable context: psychiatrists, Catholic representatives, spiritist leaders, state officials, and the mentally ill, all caught in the shifting landscape of modern state formation.Manuella Meyer investigates the key junctures at which psychiatrists sought to establish their authority and the ways in which their adversaries challenged this authority. These moments serve as productive points from which to explore the moral and political economies of mental health, demonstrating how socio-political negotiations shape psychiatric professionalization. Meyer argues that the gradual adoption of punitive configurations of insanity helped sanction socioeconomic and political inequalities during a time of rapid socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformation. The chapters discuss the sanity in South Atlantic with the myth of Philippe Pinel and the Asylum Campaing Movement between 1830 and 1852. It comments about the fight for psychiatric management of the Hospício Pedro II during Brazil's Second Empire, the government of psychiatry in the National Insane Asylum's interior lives. The text also argues about the psychiatrists under state and civil scrutiny, Rio de Janeiro's mental hygiene movement and mad spirits of progress.

"Of Grand Intentions" and "Opaque Structures": Managing the Hospício Pedro II during Brazil's Second Empire (1852-90).

This article chronicles contestations between religious actors, represented by the Brazilian Santa Casa de Misericórdia Catholic lay brotherhood and the French nun order, the Daughters of Charity, on one hand, and emergent psychiatrists, on the other, over the governance of the Hospício Pedro II, Brazil's first public asylum. It investigates how psychiatrists, as apostles of professional rationality, developed their ideas about reason and bureaucratic power in a contested site of religious charity during Brazil's Second Empire (1852-90). Apart from sharing ideological ground about the need to seclude the insane in the asylum, I argue that these groups brought divergent and entangled epistemologies about the constructions of madness, its treatment, and its bureaucratic governance.