La contribución de Augusto Orrego Luco a la psiquiatría chilena / The contribution of Augusto Orrego Luco to chilean psychiatry

ABSTRACT

Augusto Orrego Luco born in 1848 and dead in 1933 in Valparaís, was one of the greatest clinicians and researchers of chilean medicine during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Besides being a psychiatrist he contributed to literature, history, politics and medicine. He received his medical degree in 1974 and apart from being an anatomist, soon became interested in mental illness. The title of his thesis was Mental Hallucinations. He worked in the insane asylum after José Ramón Elguero. Later in 1891, he was the succesor of professor Carlos Sazie at the Hospital for Nervous and Mental illnesses. Orrego Luco was influenced by french neurology of Jean Martin Charcot and taught a preferentially neurological psychiatry, based on the anatomo-clinical method. His original works were on traumatic hysteria, the mechanism of hypnosis, hysterical hemiplegia, causes of mental hallucinations, syphilitic etiology of Tabes and anatomy of cerebral sulci. In his work about mimical neuroses, he considered and obligation not to discriminate between organic and non-organic patients, because both suffer, he claimed. Presently, Orrego Luco is considered the creator and instigator of the Psychiatry chair, turning in into one of the main medical specialties in Chile