Juliano Moreira: Google Doodle celebrates Afro-Brazilian psychiatrist’s 149th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 149th birthday of Afro-Brazilian psychiatrist Juliano Moreira, the pioneer of psychoanalysis in Brazil, on January 6, 2021.

Who was Juliano Moreira?

Juliano Moreira was born on January 6, 1872, in Salvador, the capital of the then province of Bahia. Moreira was the first Brazilian university professor to refer to and use the psychoanalytic theory in the teaching of medicine.

Because of his outstanding intelligence, Moreira was permitted to register at the Bahia School of Medicine at only 13 years of age.

Juliano Moreira learned at the Faculdade de Medicina da Bahia (Faculty of Medicine of Bahia), today the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), graduating in 1891 with the thesis Sífilis maligna precoce (Early malignant syphilis).

In 1896, Juliano Moreira became a professor of psychiatry at his alma mater. Moreira directed his concentration toward the treatment of mental illness, and he traveled the world to study to contemplate other nations’ methodologies.

From 1895 to 1902, Juliano Moreira went to mental illness courses and internships and visited numerous asylums in Germany, England, France, Italy, and Scotland.

Notwithstanding study trips, he was frequently needed to search out specialists and clinics to treat his own tuberculosis.

At the point when the sickness deteriorated, Juliano Moreira 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. The two wedded in the mid-1910s and met up in Brazil.

Juliano Moreira picked up the opportunity to apply his freshly discovered information in 1903 when he was named to run a national hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for patients with mental sicknesses.

From 1903 to 1930, Juliano Moreira was the director of the Hospício Nacional de Alienados (National Asylum for the Insane), at present Hospício Pedro II, in Rio de Janeiro.

During his residency, he humanized the patients’ treatment and finished their imprisonment. Over almost three decades in the position, he implemented clearing changes to give a more humanistic and scientific way to deal with patient care.

Juliano Moreira likewise co-authored a 1903 law that constrained the humane treatment of individuals with mental illnesses in the nation.

Moreira criticized the pseudoscientific racist beliefs embraced at that point, for example, that racial miscegenation caused mental illnesses; he defended that they were because of physical and situational factors, for example, poor hygiene and absence of access to education.

Juliano Moreira was the first analyst to distinguish mucosal cutaneous leishmaniasis and tried to demonstrate that the racial issue didn’t propel the illness.

Moreira joined the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 1917 and was its president from 1926 to 1929.

To honor Juliano Moreira’s heritage, a hospital in his hometown of Salvador has renamed the Juliano Moreira Hospital during the ’30s.

Juliano Moreira died in 1933 in Petrópolis, in a sanatory to treat his tuberculosis. Colônia Juliano Moreira, a psychiatric colony close to Rio de Janeiro was named after him.

On January 6, 2021, Google observes Juliano Moreira’s 149th Birthday with Google Doodle.