It analyzes the possible relationship between religious practice and the unhealthy male body in Brazilian anticlerical literature of the nineteenth century. To do that, it examines the character Bernardo, protagonist of Morbus: pathological romance, 1898, from the Pernambuco Faria Neves Sobrinho, noting the role of celebratory rites - mass and pilgrimage - in his sickly frame. We conclude that the text in question is set within the nineteenthcentury scientistic and anti-clerical modernizer logic to establish clear links between male hysteria and perversive religious practice.
anticlericalism; brazilian literature; Catholic Church; liturgy; pilgrimage