From nutrition to powerful agent of degeneration: alcohol in nineteenth-century Chile and Brazil

Rebolledo M.B. · Alcohol, Psychiatry and Society: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, C. 1700–1990s (2022) · DOI: 10.7765/9781526159410.00010

Resumen

This chapter assesses both medical developments and drinking habits in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Chile and Brazil during the nineteenth century. The focus is on the flow of ideas to South America from Europe, in particular from France and Germany. Employing a comparative approach, the author maps the similarities in the adoption of specific European nosologies, diagnostics and therapies, as well as differences in the ways particular European-bred ideas were modified and adapted to very different local conditions in the two South American countries. The cases of Chile and Brazil show that there was no one single ‘South American blueprint’ in regard to the flow of psychiatrists’ ideas about alcohol consumption and their approaches to alcohol misuse. Neither was it necessarily the case that the psychiatric ideas prevalent or developed in the former colonisers' countries would become the standard models for independent nations: doctors in Chile and Brazil looked to France and Germany rather than Spain and Portugal for medical inspiration, education and training. This chapter shows that in both countries the framing of alcoholism as a diagnostic category contributed to the pathologisation of alcohol consumption and the institutionalisation of psychiatry as a medical science and field of diagnostic competence and therapeutic intervention. At the end of the nineteenth century, and in sharp contrast to Spain, ‘alcoholism’ was the most prevalent diagnostic category in psychiatric institutions in Chile and Brazil, subsequently underpinning intense campaigns of social hygiene. © Manchester University Press 2022.