Barbacena
One of the most gruesome tales is that it was a frequent practice at the hospital to disincarnate the dead, which basically consisted in putting them into tubs filled with acid in order to remove the flesh and sell the skeletons to the medical schools. Many interns took part in these functions, disincarnating their dead friends, and many medical schools throughout Brazil bought the cadavers from Barbacena to fuel up their anatomy laboratories.
The most rebellious ones, or those who committed an act that was considered by the workers as an act of disobedience, were imprisoned in cells, cuffed by their hands and feet, kept under many different methods and techniques. They underwent sessions of electrocution, out of which they left with broken bones and teeth, and even dead.
There was a surgery room in the hospital in which psychosurgeries were performed, where procedures such as Bloodletting, more appropriately called phlebotomy were done. This procedure leads to a state of sedation of the patient and subsequent emotional inactivity, considered efficient in the improvement of external psychiatric symptoms of the disease.
In 1979, a well known Italian psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia, visited the colonial hospital of Barbacena and compared them with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi concentration camps.
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