The Women's Colony of Engenho de Dentro

first female psychiatric institution in Brazil and its inmates, 1911-1932

Abstract

The objective of this article is to provide a little insight into the history of the Women's Colony of Engenho de Dentro, discussing its creation process and the policies of the administrations of Braule Pinto (1911-1918) and Gustavo Riedel (1918-1932), and identify and analyze the main sociodemographic and clinical variables of the asylum population. In this investigation, we took as main sources 2 Patient Registration Books (1911-1918 and 1919-1934) and 19 Clinical Observation Books (1911-1932). As a method, we opted for a quantitative approach with a descriptive focus. To address the aforementioned psychiatric population, we built a database with registration information of the 2,590 hospitalized between August 1911 and December 1932 (name, color, nationality, age, profession, marital status, origin, admitting institution, diagnosis, date of entry into the hospital and the colony, and exit from the colony). The objective data from the Observation Books such as diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and type of work to which it is dedicated also made up the database for this research. Furthermore, we included administrative documents in the investigation that allow us to understand the functioning of the two administrations. In the theoretical field, we rely on the history of medicine “from below” (Porter, 1985), the cultural history of psychiatry (Huertas, 2012) and the feminist social epistemology of Donna Haraway (2009).