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During the second half of the nineteenth century, the city of Rio de Janeiro say its first measures of repression taken against those beggars who lived in a modernizing city. Those actions aimed at removing the population lived in the streets, such as disabled people, those begging for a job and those people abandoned by their relatives because they were considered mad. However, those measures did not result only from a modernizing project enforced by the State and its oppressive tools (the police); there was also the formation of a public opinion that was mobilized by newspapers that called for the establishment of an urban order. Still, there was an ongoing legal dispute headed by doctors on the responsibility over those considered alienated. In that sense, this paper wants to show the complex relations concerning that historical subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines the strategic role played by the Brazilian Annals of Medicine, the official organ of the Imperial Academy of Medicine. Its objective was to socially legitimize the medical elite in the field of mental health. It sought to broaden its prerogatives in the area of madness, criminal liability, civil rights and forensic medicine between 1860 and 1880. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]