Making the boundary: neurology, psychiatry, and legal medicine in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1881-1912

Resumo

ABSTRACT

Background: The early institutional histories of neurology and psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro developed in overlapping academic, editorial, and professional settings, making present-day disciplinary boundaries an unreliable guide to that period.

Objective: To examine how teaching structures, scientific publishing, professional societies, and psychiatric classification contributed to disciplinary boundary-making in Rio de Janeiro between 1881 and 1912.

Methods: Critical historical synthesis of the published historiography and of the primary sources cited here, centred on the reorganization of 1881-1883, the journal founded in 1905, the society founded in 1907, and the separate Neurology chair of 1912.

Results: Historical accounts describe a first Chair in Clinical Psychiatry in Brazil in 1881; the imperial budget law of 30 October 1882 (Law No. 3,141) created new chairs in the medical faculties, to be filled by public competition, and the historiography links this reorganization to teaching on mental diseases. João Carlos Teixeira Brandão took the corresponding chair after the 1883 competition, a chair joining Clinical Psychiatry and Diseases of the Nervous System. In 1905, Juliano Moreira and Afrânio Peixoto founded a journal joining psychiatry, neurology, and related sciences; a society adding legal medicine followed in 1907, and the journal took the same three-part name in 1908. The separate Neurology chair of 1912 marked institutional differentiation rather than abrupt intellectual rupture.

Conclusion: Neurological autonomy emerged through gradual, asynchronous changes in teaching, publication, and professional organization. Legal medicine formed a third institutional axis, complicating any simple binary account of a division between brain and mind.

Keywords: History of Medicine; Neurology; Psychiatry; Education, Medical; Professional Role.