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The Alienist

I — How Itaguaí Got a Madhouse

The chronicles of the town of Itaguaí tell that in remote times there lived there a certain physician, Dr. Simão Bacamarte, son of the local nobility and the greatest of the physicians of Brazil, Portugal and the Spains. He had studied in Coimbra and Padua. At thirty-four he returned to Brazil, the king being unable to persuade him to stay in Coimbra, presiding over the university, or in Lisbon, dispatching the affairs of the monarchy.

— Science, he told His Majesty, is my sole occupation; Itaguaí is my universe.

Having said this, he settled in Itaguaí and gave himself body and soul to the study of science, alternating cures with readings and proving theorems with poultices. At forty he married Dona Evarista da Costa e Mascarenhas, a lady of twenty-five, the widow of a circuit judge, neither pretty nor pleasant. One of his uncles, a paca hunter before the Lord and no less frank, was astonished at such a choice and told him so.

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Simão Bacamarte explained that Dona Evarista possessed physiological and anatomical qualities of the first order: she digested easily, slept regularly, had a good pulse and excellent eyesight; she was thus fit to give him robust, healthy and intelligent children. If, besides these gifts — the only ones worthy of a sage’s concern —, Dona Evarista was ill-favored in her features, far from lamenting it he thanked God for it, since he ran no risk of neglecting the interests of science in the exclusive, petty and vulgar contemplation of his consort.

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Dona Evarista belied Dr. Bacamarte’s hopes: she gave him children neither robust nor sickly. The natural temper of science is forbearance; our physician waited three years, then four, then five. At the end of that time he made a thorough study of the matter, reread all the Arab writers and others he had brought to Itaguaí, sent inquiries to the Italian and German universities, and ended by advising his wife to follow a special diet. The illustrious lady, fed exclusively on the fine pork of Itaguaí, did not heed her husband’s admonitions;

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and to her resistance — explicable, but unspeakable — we owe the total extinction of the Bacamarte dynasty.

But science has the ineffable gift of healing all sorrows; our physician plunged entirely into the study and practice of medicine. It was then that one corner of it drew his particular attention — the psychic corner, the examination of cerebral pathology. There was not, in the colony or even in the kingdom, a single authority on that subject, little explored or almost unexplored. Simão Bacamarte understood that Lusitanian science, and Brazilian science in particular, could cover itself with "unfading laurels" — an expression he used himself, but in a burst of domestic intimacy;

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outwardly he was modest, as befits the learned.

— The health of the soul, he exclaimed, is the worthiest occupation of the physician.

— Of the true physician, corrected Crispim Soares, the town apothecary and one of his friends and table companions.

Machado de Assis, The Alienist, chapter I (1882), public domain. Translation made with generative AI by Stream.Builders from the Portuguese original; suggestions are welcome.

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