This paper discusses de emergency of the medical discourse on issues regarding the transgressor behavior in the Lusitanian intellectual context of the eighteenth century, through the works Dissertação sobre as paixões da alma (1753) by Antonio Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783) and Medicina Theologica (1794) by Francisco de Melo Franco (1757-1823). Both written and published during the enlightened reforms in Portugal, in the period extending from the Pombal's consulate and the reign of D. Maria I. Based on rational-empiricist philosophical references, both authors have used an renewed medical vocabulary, which was being forged at that time through the intense debates between vitalists, animists and mechanicists, among others medical circles, to question the traditional discourses, especially Law and Theology, and claim for the legitimacy of the Medicine to treat the human soul as part of its own jurisdiction.
passions of the soul; Antonio Ribeiro Sanches; Francisco de Melo Franco