Forensic medical reports of Alejandro Korn. The frontier of positivism

Abstract

The Forensic Medical Reports are accounts of cases that Alejandro Korn raised at different times as a forensic expert to the judge while he exercised the direction of the Melchor Romero Hospital and were published in 1902. They present the peculiarity of not strictly adhering to the canons of the psychiatric story and how he points out, he does not use them to apply theory. However, in their presentation, he established the difference with his thesis work where the presence of the influences of positivism in which he had formed was more important, and established a relationship between madness and crime. By the time of the writing of the Reports, the possibility of sustaining this correlation had moved away from his ideas. These were times when it was thought that crime and insanity were related to immigration. As it would happen later in his philosophical developments, he imprinted the writing of those reports with his own stamp, differentiating, with its contradictions, from the Italian school and the positivist currents prevailing in Europe.