Juliano Moreira: Google celebrates 149th birthday of pioneer of psychoanalysis in Brazil

Happy Birthday Juliano Moreira!!!

Google today dedicates a beautiful doodle to the Brazilian psychiatrist, Juliano Moreira on his 149^th birthday. He is still often considered the pioneer of psychoanalysis in Brazil.

Juliano Moreira was born on January 6, 1872 in Salvador, capital of the then province of Bahia. He is remembered with full honor for revolutionizing the treatment of people with mental illnesses in Brazil.

Juliano Moreira gets the credit for tirelessly fighting to combat scientific racism and the false linkage of mental illness to skin color. He studied at the Faculdade de Medicina da Bahia (Faculty of Medicine of Bahia). He graduated in 1891 with the thesis Sífilis maligna precoce (Early malignant syphilis). In 1896 he became a professor of psychiatry at his alma mater.

Between 1895 and 1902, Juliano Moreira visited many asylums in Germany, England, France, Italy, and Scotland. He gained the opportunity to apply his newfound knowledge in 1903 when he was appointed to run a national hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for patients with mental illnesses. He was the first Brazilian university professor to cite and use the psychoanalytic theory in the teaching of medicine.

Juliano Moreira often needed to seek out specialists and clinics to treat his own tuberculosis. When the disease got worse, he took a new license and traveled to Europe for better treatment and later went to a sanatorium in Cairo, where he met Augusta Peick, a German nurse from Hamburg. They married in early 1910s and came together in Brazil.

Over nearly three decades in the position, Juliano Moreira implemented sweeping reforms to provide a more humanistic and scientific approach to patient care. He also co-authored a 1903 law that compelled the humane treatment of people with mental illnesses in the country.

Juliano Moreira served the position of director of the Hospício Nacional de Alienados (National Asylum for the Insane) between 1903 and 1930. During his tenure, he humanized the patients' treatment and ended their imprisonment.

Juliano Moreira also gets the credit of identifying mucosal cutaneous leishmaniasis. He sought to prove that the racial issue did not motivate the disease. He also joined the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 1917 and was its president from 1926 to 1929.

Juliano Moreira died at the age of 61 on May 2, 1933 in a sanatory to treat his tuberculosis. A hospital in his hometown of Salvador was renamed the Juliano Moreira Hospital in the mid-’30s.

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