The story ran in Rio de Janeiro's newspaper A Estação (from 15 October 1881 to 15 March 1882), then was published in 1882 as part of the author's short-story collection Papéis avulsos ("Single Papers").
Bacamarte, a Brazil-born Portuguese (when Brazil was a colony), is a prominent physician whose sincere obsession for discovering a universal method to cure pathological disorders drives inhabitants of the small Brazilian town of Itaguaí to fear, conspiracy, and revolutionary attempts.
Porfírio, the town's barber, indicts Bacamarte for his corruptive influence over the Municipal Council, which since the beginning approved the experiments taken place at the Green House, "the Bastille of human Knowledge".
This gives pause to Bacamarte, who changes his tack and decides that balanced people are actually a small minority, and thus the anomaly that should be cured: the modest, the loyal, the wise, the patient, etc., are now admitted to be scientifically disequilibrated according to his new theory.
[citation needed] In 2010, Natália Klein published the science fiction novel O Alienista Caçador de Mutantes, the Casa Verde imprisons victims of mutation, caused by the fall of a flying saucer in Itaguaí.