The concept of urgency literature is presented to define the type of writing carried out in emergency situations, which are borderline: in the specific case of Lima Barreto, it serves as the basis for the analysis of the Diário do hospício produced by the applicant in 1919-20, when he was admitted to the alienated National Hospital in Rio de Janeiro. This literature is shown to be contaminated by the lauriation and routine in the manicômio, and is both a writ created by her to defend myself at the institution and a document of historical value capable of denouncing, by the patient’s viés, psychiatric day minutiae that are normally absent from the official hotel literature.