Train to Juqueri, reminiscences of a young medical student about the internment of women in a psychiatric hospital in the 1940s The case of the mulatto Judith and the famous patient

This article focuses on the recollections of psychiatrist Haim Grünspun regarding the train journeys he took to the Juqueri asylum in the 1940s, when he was still a young medical student interning at the institution. These memories are recounted in a book titled Trem para o Hospício (“Train to the Asylum”), published in 1980. In the book, Grünspun recalls conversations with patients, their relatives, staff members, doctors, and laypeople, as well as his impressions of these individuals and the institution itself. Our aim here is to analyze specifically two chapters entitled “A Mulata Judith” and “The Cure of Hysteria,” in which the psychiatrist remembers situations involving the internment of female patients. These accounts allow us to reflect on certain issues involving medical and social hierarchies, asylum power, psychiatric diagnoses and treatments, and gender relations, as reported by the psychiatrist during the period in which he wrote the book. Indeed, it is important to note that everything our memoirist presents consists of his memories of events that had occurred more than thirty years earlier. In this sense, although the book aims to be a referential record, it also carries a significant degree of invention or re-creation, comprising narratives reconstructed by the author’s.

KEYWORDS:
history of psychiatry; memory; gender