This study is one of the products of post-doctoral research carried out between 2004 and 2006 at the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz, with the support of the research funding agencies CNPq and Faperj. The goal was to arrive at a cartography of psychiatric practices at the Hospício Nacional de Alienados (HNA) by surveying and analyzing the processes of constructing diagnoses and length of hospitalization and correlating these with the patient's ethnic and national origin, occupation, gender, marital status, age, social class, mortality rate, geographical origin, and other attributes. The present article limits itself to the issue of gender and madness during the first three decades of the twentieth century.
gender; madness; asylum; psychiatric practices; Brazil