Dr. Manuella Meyer

My current research focuses on the social and political history of medicine in Latin America.  Specifically, I am interested in the history of psychiatry and its role in public health projects.  My first book, Reasoning Against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944, examines the origins of psychiatry and how madness was managed.  It dialogues with historians and social scientists across geographical boundaries about public health, the history of welfare, gender, race discourse, state building, modernity and the socioeconomic organization of post-emancipation societies. 

I am currently working on a book, Making Brazilian Children: Child Welfare and the Psychiatry of Childhood, 1922-1954, that focuses on how mental health professionals understood children as the symbolic harbingers of modern nationhood, and how they crafted child welfare policies and initiatives to ostensibly develop children’s, and the nation’s, full development.