Urano, Onán y Venus: La sexualidad psicopatologizada en el Uruguay del Siglo XIX

Abstract

As of the second half of the nineteenth century, Uruguayan society began making strides towards a process of medicalization to have led to the growing presence of doctors in everyday life. It was in this context that psychiatry came to gain ground (as did other branches of medicine), serving as an instrument used by doctors to designate not just psychiatric illnesses of a biological origin, but also moral and social causes which unequivocally led to “madness”. Homosexuality, masturbation and prostitution were to be found among these practices, and were not only considered criminal offences, but also psychopathological manifestations. Among other social problems, psychiatrists tackled the approach to sexual practices and their normativization, charging various state police and health institutions with the containment, repression and isolation of all men and women who demonstrated any kind of “deviance” in their sexual behavior. With this as its starting point, our work analyzes the psychiatrists’ stance on sexuality during the period from 1880 to 1910. To do so, we consider four of the period’s main medical concerns: homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation and prostitution.