Scholarship 24/13988-9 - Loucura - BV FAPESP
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The Invention of the Asylum: Dialogues between France and Brazil in the Creation of Hospício Pedro II (Pedro II Hospice)

Grant number: 24/13988-9
Support Opportunities:Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
Start date until: March 01, 2025
End date until: August 31, 2025
Field of knowledge:Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning
Principal Investigator:Ana Claudia Scaglione Veiga de Castro
Grantee:Beatriz Fernandez Vaz Oliveira
Supervisor: Monica Raisa Schpun
Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
Institution abroad: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France  
Associated to the scholarship:22/03906-0 - The buildings of the Hospital Nacional de Alienados and the Colony of Engenho de Dentro: fictions and spaces of madness in the diaries of Lima Barreto and Maura Lopes Cançado, BP.DR

Abstract

The circulation of the ideas and treatises by French alienists during the 19th century, especially those of Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1745-1826), led to the production of a series of Brazilian medical theses on mental alienation. In this context, the Hospício Pedro II (Pedro II Hospice) was established in Rio de Janeiro, formalizing the adoption of the solution proposed by alienism for the issue of madness, its treatment, and social destiny. The Pedro II Hospice, opened in 1852, was the first of its kind to be implemented in Brazil. Its conception resulted from a medical project that, by placing madness within the domain of mental illness, following the assumptions of the newly created French alienism, proposed confinement and isolation through asylum admissions as a form of treatment for such illness. That logic operated in tandem with the exclusion of difference and illness advocated by a hygienist city project that ultimately materialized the imperial aspirations for a civilization where norms, order, and reason triumphed. According to a publication in the magazine O Universo Ilustrado (1858), the Pedro II Hospice building was "based on the plans of the Charenton Asylum", located in Val-de-Marne (on the outskirts of the Bois de Vincennes), near Paris. Beyond such statement, which has been repeated and appropriated by authors who have focused on the Pedro II Hospice in their respective research, there are no studies that shed light on this relationship by comparing both projects. Therefore, the aim of this research is to compare the design of the French asylum (Asile de Charenton) with that of the Pedro II Hospice. More broadly, it aims to better understand the genesis of this urban and architectural object, which inaugurated the adoption of the asylum typology in Brazil, from which the other forms of isolation and treatment of madness were conceived, as discussed in the author's ongoing doctoral research.

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