Jurists versus doctors: the birth of legal medicine in the United States.

This paper considers some of the problems that attended the birth of legal medicine in the USA. The historical study of relations between American medicine and jurisprudence and ethics should identify some of the philosophical assumptions that inspire their views of anomalous behaviour.

[Botany in Spanish scientific expeditions].

One of the most important contributions of the Spanish Enlightenment was the knowledge of the American flora. From the Royal Botanical Garden, the Cabinet of Natural History and the Marine, a plan of expeditions was expounded that would cover important floristic colonial areas. They wanted to know the wealth of those lands in the intent of getting species useful to different industries: alimentary, textile and sanitarian.

[Between the consulting room and the asylum, reflections on end of the century Spanish psychiatry].

Psychiatry and nerurology began to converge as the 19th century advanced and the concept or mental illness was increasingly seen as the result of lesions appearing in the nervous system. The reasons for this convergence are to be found in very different areas, in the development of neurology, both in morphological and physiological findings and in the respective pathologies, and in the changes in psychiatric observation. These changes meant a longer and more careful analysis of the illness, together with the appearance of new syndromes and better understanding of those already know.