This is a review of the vast and recent North-American bibliography concerning nerves and attacks of nerves from the point of view of Medicai Anthropology. The author describes the analytical instruments underlying both the specific ethnographic contribution and the general conceptual frame of Medicai Anthropology. He argues against the reductionist use of "power" and "gender" in the otherwise necessary critique of biomedical models of "nervous disease" or "illness". He emphasizes the need of a greater atten-tion to the historical dimension of these phenomena and to their embedded-ness in the context of modern Western culture models of the Person and physical-moral perturbations. He accounts for the main ethnographic contri-butions of that literature for the knowledge of nerves. in a comparison with Brazilian and European sources.