Taking as the point of departure the academic image of Juliano Moreira as the founder of scientific psychiatry in Brazil, this study analyzes the concepts he expressed on mental disease, race, and sexuality. His theories constituted a sui generis transposition of the thinking of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, aiding in the construction of the ideals in defense of the Brazilian civilizational process in the early 20th century. He based his concepts on organicist premises, while arguing against the then-prevailing notion of so-called unfavorable "natural" Brazilian conditions such as climate and race. Analyzing the work published by Juliano Moreira until 1920, one sees how his scientific discourse discussed the theme of sexuality, expressed under the label of "syphilis", "reproduction", and "marriage". On this point, Juliano Moreira did not resort to the idea of a degenerated female nature, increasingly widespread in the mid-19th century. Although he did not rule out the more general notion of degeneration, pertinent only to the level of individual organic units, he did rule out the correlation between degeneration and female nature to focus on the hegemonic medical foundations of the first half of the 19th century, which linked differential female characteristics and female sexual physiology, represented paradigmatically by the image of the uterus.
Race; sexuality; mental disease; psychiatric science; Juliano Moreira