Figures of melancholy in confrontation: between Portuguese singularity and universal disease - 1880-1920

Abstract

The proposed internship is part of the research I've been doing on the intersections between the history of emotions and the history of psychiatry. It is centered on the study of medical interpretations of sadness considered profound and incapacitating between 1880 and 1920. Its main objective is to survey, select and analyze two groups of historical sources found in Portuguese collections on mental disorders related to sadness (lipemania, nostalgia and neurasthenia). The first group refers to information found in the medical records of patients admitted to the old Lisbon hospital of Rilhafoles, the country's first psychiatric asylum. The second is made up of texts by Portuguese doctors, concerned with diagnosing and treating a series of symptoms considered to be close to or mixed with melancholia, archived at the National Library of Portugal, the National Archive of Torre do Tombo, the "Barahona Fernandes" library, the Júlio de Matos Hospital, Lisbon Psychiatric Hospital Center. The questions guiding the internship proposed here are the following: how did Portuguese psychiatrists define symptoms involving deep sadness and melancholy? Were there differences between the sexes in the way these problems were conceived? On the basis of what arguments was melancholia integrated into a universal classification of mental illnesses that included neurasthenia, lipemania and depression? The main hypothesis of the research is that the development of Portuguese psychiatry, in the light of European progress in the field, represented an attempt to include melancholy - including some types of sadness - in the field of mental pathologies, thus opposing the old assumption that the melancholic temperament was typical of the Lusitanian soul.Keywords: history, psychiatry, Portuguese melancholy