ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the studies of the doctors Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes and Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães, critics of materialistic medicine. Both Loucura sob novo prisma [Madness in a new light] of the former and Alma e cérebro [Soul and Brain] of the latter are peculiar attempts to confront nineteenth-century scientific materialism. Their readings attest the presence of Victor Cousin’s spiritualist philosophy. These are readings that seek to overcome some theses in vogue until then, such as cerebral localizationism and the anatomopathological model. Bezerra de Menezes’ is a reading with a clearly religious interface, proposing an etiology, nosography and treatment for madness based on Spiritism. In both works the soul appears centrally, contradicting the supremacy of the brain as the organ responsible for thinking, as it appeared in cerebral localizationism.
Keywords:
Spiritism; mental disease; spiritualism