THE CONTRIBUTION OF ORREGOLUCO,AUGUSTO TO CHILEAN PSYCHIATRY

Augusto Orrego Luco born in 1848 and dead in 1933 in Valparaiso, was o ne of the greatest clinicians and researchers of chilian medicine duri ng the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Besides being a ps ychiatrist be contributed to literature, history, politics and medicin e. He received his medical degree in 1874 and, apart from being an ana tomist, soon became interested in mental illnesses. The title of his t hesis was ''Mental Hallucinations''. He worked in the insane asylum af ter Jose Ramon Elguero. Later, in 1891, he was the successor of profes sor Carlos Sazie at the Hospital for Nervous and Mental Illness. Orreg o Luco was influenced by french neurology of Jean Martin Charcot and t aught a preferentially neurological psychiatry, based on the anatomo-c linical method. His original works were on traumatic hysteria, the mec hanism of hypnosis, hysterical hemiplegia, causes of mental hallucinat ions, syphilitic etiology of Tabes and anatomy of cerebral sulci. In h is work about mimical neuroses, be considered and obligation not to di scriminate between organic and non-organic patients, because both suff er, he claimed. Presently, Orrego Luco is considered the creator and i nstigator of the Psychiatry chair, turning it into one of the main med ical specialties in Chile.