This article analyzes how the Brazilian psychiatrists Henrique Roxo and Murillo de Campos understood and differentiated between the diagnostic categories dementia praecox and schizophrenia at the end of the 1920s in scientific articles published in the principal psychiatric journal of the time. We note how the aforementioned psychiatrists incorporated the European knowledge that created these diagnostic categories and how they represented them in the context of the institutionalization of psychiatry in Brazil. We seek to understand how this scientific diagnostic naming and defining process developed in conjunction with the definition of the difference between what should and should not be considered phenomena, with respect to mental pathologies.
dementia praecox; schizophrenia; psychiatric classification; history; Brazil
