Entre plantas e purgantes

as terapêuticas mais utilizadas pelo médico João Curvo Semedo nos diagnósticos das “doenças mentais”

Abstract

In recent decades, we have observed the dynamism of studies about the History of Medicine, where the concern is no longer solely focused on showing its institutional advances but on studying cultural, economic, and social aspects through the History of Medicine itself. In this sense, it is noticeable that, through medical writings and documents, we can observe and describe how a social body, sometimes temporally distant from contemporaneity, behaved, and even identify what the prevailing social conducts of the period were. Thus, the present work aims to analyze what Portuguese medicine at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, here presented in the treatises Polyanthea Medicinal (1697), Atalaya da vida contra as hostilidades da morte (1720), and Observações médicas doutrinais de cem casos gravíssimos (1707) by João Curvo Semedo, understood about diseases involving the mind and human behavior, identifying such processes through the treatments given to patients.