A tribute to Juliano Moreira on his birth sesquicentennial

Abstract

A hundred-fifty years ago, Brazil was still a slave country, and at that time the great Juliano Moreira was born, son of a black mother, a descendant of slaves, linked to the house of the Barão de Itapuã, which provided the necessary support for Moreira to attend the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia. Moreira is from Salvador, where he was born on January 6, 1872, and died in Petrópolis, on May 2, 1933. He was a son of Galdina Joaquina do Amaral, but only after the death of his mother, when Moreira was 13 years old, was he profiled by Manoel do Carmo Moreira Júnior, Portuguese, public lighting inspector. Despite these mishaps, he managed to enter the medical course in 1886 and graduated in 1891, at the age of 19, with the thesis Early Malignant Syphilis 1,2 .Moreira suffered from tuberculosis for many years and when he was admitted to a sanatorium in Cairo, he met Augusta Peick, a German nurse from Hamburg, whom he married in the early 1910s 1,2 .Nardi et al. 1 trace the journey of this exceptional Brazilian from the beginning of his life, the dawn of his career until he arrived in Rio de Janeiro when he soon became director of the Hospício Nacional dos Alienados -HNA (National Hospice for the Insane) before the proclamation of the Republic called Hospício Pedro II and there, from 1903 until 1930, he left his definitive legacy for the history of Psychiatry and of Brazilian Neurology. Already in life, Moreira was recognized nationally and internationally, having taken a turn in the paths of Psychiatry, deviating from the French alienist current traditionally adopted in Brazil, by the German psychiatric current led by Emil Kraepelin. Moreira acted to boost national scientific production and promote means of exchange with renowned foreign scientific centers with the help for instance of Afrânio Peixoto by the creation in 1905 of the periodical Archivos Brasileiros de Psychiatria, Neurologia e Sciencias Affins/ Brazilian Archives of Psychiatry, Neurology and Allied Sciences, which also became an arena for theoretical disputes between supporters of German psychiatry and French alienism. Three years later it was renamed Archivos Brasileiros de Psychiatria, Neurologia e Medicina Legal/Brazilian Archives of Psychiatry, Neurology and Legal Medicine, and it became a vehicle for publicizing the activities of the Society of Psychiatry, Neurology and Legal Medicine, founded in 1907, with the contribution of Moreira and dozens of other collaborators 3 . Besides, the Archivos Brasileiros de Medicina/Brazilian Archives of Medicine, created under the direction of Moreira and Antonio Austregesilo, in 1911, was another publishing medical journal in the Psychiatric and also in other medical areas 4 .As director of NHA (1903NHA ( -1930, he revolutionized the treatment of the mentally ill, making it more humanized and discrediting the racist bias of theories of mental illness linked to ethnicity, but not to the origins of the socially disadvantaged black population.