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Sanity in the South Atlantic: The mythos of Philippe Pinel and the asylum movement in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 7; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14788810.2010.516198

1740-4649

Manuella Meyer,

Health, Nursing, Elderly Care

Abstract Abstract This article chronicles the asylum movement in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. It narrates the ways in which medical reformers launched an asylum-building campaign. While their call to construct an asylum was based on local political and medical circumstances, its intellectual impetus came from the Atlantic marketplace of ideas. Political and intellectual currents in France inspired doctors intent on transforming the management of madness. Specifically, the political context from which French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) articulated a regime of more humane medical treatment for the mentally ill, known as "moral treatment," became a grounding mythology from which reformers advocated for the construction of an asylum. As such, the history of the socio-political and cultural processes that led to the creation of the first public asylum in Latin America, the Hospício Dom Pedro II, is both a Brazilian story and an Atlantic narrative. 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