ILLUSTRATES Andre Toma
EDITION Felipe van Deursen
mountain spa
In 1903, Barbacena, MG, gained the nickname of “City of the Crazy”, thanks to the inauguration of seven psychiatric institutions in the municipality. At the time, resorts with a mild climate, such as Barbacena, were seen as suitable for the treatment of mental illnesses. One of these initiatives was the Hospital Cologne. But over time, what was planned as a medical institution became a slaughterhouse.
Concentration camp
Patients were separated by sex, age and physical characteristics. like the Cologne it didn’t just treat people from the city, many came from outside, disembarking by train. In 1933, the writer Guimarães Rosa, who worked briefly as a doctor in the Cologne, called it a “crazy train”. Years later, the setting yielded inevitable comparisons to Nazi concentration camps, as they were also supplied with trains.
Target Audience
The parallels with the Nazi camps didn’t stop there. It is estimated that 70% of hospitalized patients had no record of mental illness. They were gays, alcoholics, political activists, single mothers, beggars, blacks, poor people, Indians, undocumented people, etc. In hospital psychiatric hospital, the institution became a warehouse for unwanted people. One woman was hospitalized because she was sad!
Treatments
Physical and psychological torture was routine in the Cologne. Among the most common were the Scottish shower (bath provided by high pressure machines) and shock treatments, both applied to those who did not behave well. Rapes were also reported during the decades of operation of the hospital
Shocking
In general, psychiatric hospitals used methods such as shock treatment on patients – it was not exclusive to the Cologne. The situation began to change with a revolution in the mental health system proposed by the Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, in the 1960s, and with the Anti-Manicomial Movement, created in Brazil in 1987, which wanted institutions to have a treatment and rehabilitation profile. , not prison
- Shock therapy (electroconvulsive therapy) emerged in the 1930s as an experimental alternative to treat cases of severe psychopathology.
Over crowded
O hospital it could receive up to 200 people, but it reached 5 thousand. To accommodate so many people and make room, the Cologne traded beds for grass. Dehumanization spread across the 16 pavilions, where there was a lack of running water and food. Many inmates drank and bathed in the open sewer. With a succession of mistreatment, cold and hunger, many could not resist
The hole is always lower
Realizing that the municipal cemetery could no longer contain the ever-increasing number of deaths in the Cologneemployees of hospital began trafficking bodies to medical schools, which used them in anatomy classes. If demand was low, the dead were dissolved in acid.
atrocity numbers
Precarious conditions, torture, overcrowding, abandonment and cruelty resulted in an announced catastrophe. An estimated 60,000 lives were lost in the Cologne until the end of inhumane methods in the 1980s. In 1996, one of the pavilions was transformed into a museum to keep this lamentable memory of Brazilian history alive. Today, there are less than 200 survivors of the tragedy.
CONSULTANCY Daniela Arbex, journalist and author of the book The Brazilian Holocaustand Guilherme Conti Marcello, professor of psychology at Anhanguera University (São Paulo)
SOURCE Documentary Brazilian Holocaust (HBO and Vagalume Films)