This is a historical research whose objective is to historicize the nursing team and the patients at the Hospital Colônia Sant'Ana (HCS), in the period from 1941 to 1960. Five employees that worked at the Hospital in the period of the study were interviewed and other documental sources were used. To analyze the data Foucault's theory was used. HCS was the main pole of psychiatric care in the Santa Catarina. The nursing team was constituted by the nuns, "male nurses" and "watchmen". The institution received indigent, private, and health insurance covered patients, who were diagnosed with many different problems, and some who were more of a social case than anything else. The general conditions of the Hospital were precarious. The studied period made possible visualize that the treatment given to the patients, as well as the work conditions offered to the workers, were distant from the ideal, and that it was part of a national policy, characterized by the creation of state macro psychiatric hospitals.
psychiatry; nursing; history of Nursing