Based on a study of the construction of psychiatric knowledge and practices regarding alcoholism, the article explores the development of psychiatry in Brazil from the close of the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth. It examines both the role that psychiatry assigned to alcohol in manifestations of madness as well as the hypothesis that the concept of "alcoholic psychosis" was an attempt to encompass the symptoms and problems triggered within someone with chronic alcoholism. Defining the latter as a "social disease" tended to link it with the lower classes and their customs, practices, and living conditions. In an analysis of confinement to asylums, the article also captures echoes of the era's medical discussions and uses the reflections of writer Lima Barreto as a counterpoint to medical knowledge at that time.
alcoholism; psychiatry; history of medicine; Brazil; nineteenth and twentieth centuries