By Cristina Cilli
During my research in Argentina for the SciCoMove project, I was able to explore several locations in Buenos Aires and its province, depicted in two albums preserved in the archive of the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology at the University of Turin.
The covers of these albums, which are of the same brown color and size, feature the following inscriptions: Hospicio de Las Mercedes. Buenos Aires. República Argentina (Fig. 1) and Colonia Nacional de Alienados. República Argentina (Fig. 2). These are two albums, one containing 9 photographs and the other 26, each pasted onto the pages with corresponding captions. Unfortunately, no documentation has been found to date the arrival of these albums or explain how they became part of the Lombrosian collection. My research thus aimed to better understand the institutions depicted in the albums, including the buildings of the two psychiatric facilities, the interior spaces, and, in rare cases, the psychiatric patients themselves.

Fig. 1 – Cover of the Photo Album “Hospicio de Las Mercedes. Buenos Aires. República Argentina”, preserved in the Archive of the Lombroso Museum, University of Turin.

Fig. 2 – Cover of the Photo Album “Colonia Nacional de Alienados. República Argentina”, preserved in the Archive of the Lombroso Museum, University of Turin.
The Hospicio de las Mercedes (Fig. 3), now the Psychiatric Hospital Borda, is located in Buenos Aires, not far from the Constitución railway station, while the Colonia Nacional de Alienados (Fig. 4) is situated in the municipality of Luján, in the province of Buenos Aires, about 75 km from the capital. The history of these two institutions is closely intertwined.

Fig. 3 – Hospicio de las Mercedes. Photograph of the Lucio Melendez Pabellon for criminally insane patients. Archive of the Lombroso Museum, University of Turin.
Chronologically, the first to be founded was the Hospicio de Las Mercedes, on November 11, 1863, under the name Hospicio de San Buenaventura, which was later renamed in 1888 to the name listed in the album. Between 1905 and 1993, the hospital was under national administration, subsequently taking the names Hospital Nacional Neuropsiquiátrico de Hombres (from 1949) and Hospital Nacional José T. Borda (from 1967), in honor of psychiatrist José Tiburcio Borda, who held the chair of psychiatry at the University of Buenos Aires. Borda was a visionary in Argentine psychiatry, particularly for being the first to recognize his patients as suffering from illness and entitled to specialized medical care.
In 1879, the Director of the Hospicio, Dr. Lucio Meléndez, presented to the Buenos Aires municipality a proposal to establish a Colonia de alienados in a rural area of the province. His intention was to alleviate overcrowding caused by the admission of psychiatric patients from the provinces. These individuals were often abandoned on the streets of Buenos Aires, sometimes by their own families, so that the police would pick them up for vagrancy and begging, and then deposit them in the Hospicio. Furthermore, the phenomenon of immigration at the turn of the 20th century contributed to the increase in the number of mentally ill individuals. Many immigrants arrived filled with hope, desires, and plans to settle in the city, but soon found themselves in a desperate struggle for survival, leading to conditions that predisposed them to mental illness.

Fig. 4 – Colonia Nacional de Alienados Open Door. General view photograph preserved in the Archive of the Lombroso Museum, University of Turin.
The doctor Domingo Cabred (1859–1929) (Fig. 5), successor to Meléndez in the management of the Hospicio de Las Mercedes, proposed in 1892 an approach for his patients based on freedom, physical and moral well-being, and a work therapy that included the possibility of social integration.

Fig. 5 – Marble bust commemorating psychiatrist Domingo Cabred, located at the entrance of the administrative building in the Colonia Nacional de Alienados Open Door in Luján.
Cabred continued the reforms initiated by the administration that preceded him, revealing in his decisions a decidedly progressive mindset for the time: “The insane, called criminals, must be cared for in common asylums and not in special sections of prisons…,” he declared at the National Congress of Criminal Anthropology, held in Geneva in 1896. For this specific category of patients, a building was constructed at the Hospicio de las Mercedes in Buenos Aires, inaugurated in 1899, and named the Padiglione Lucio Meléndez (Fig. 3).
Cabred also commissioned a famous French landscape architect and naturalist, Carlos Thays, who had become an Argentine citizen, to design a garden with a fountain and other outdoor spaces. Finally, with the support of the distinguished physician Dr. Elíseo Cantón, Cabred succeeded in having a law (No. 3548) passed in 1897 that mandated the creation of a National Colony for the mentally ill “subject to the rules of the new Scottish system of hospitalization and medical care in Open Door asylums.”
Thus, the Colonia Nacional de Alienados (Fig. 4) was inaugurated with the laying of the first stone on May 12, 1899, in the presence of Argentine President Julio A. Roca, following the rules of the new Scottish system of hospitalization and medical care in Open Door asylums. The colony became operational only in August 1901, when it received its first 11 patients transferred from the Hospicio de Las Mercedes in Buenos Aires.
Meanwhile, the acquisition of a property of over 600 hectares in the Luján district, north of the town of the same name, was completed, and the construction of Swiss-French style pavilions began, using both paid labor and the labor of prisoners from the colony. The fundamental idea was to contrast the therapeutic value of work and rural life, synonymous with health, with the “illness” established in the city.
From then on, funding from that same institution and others increased, bringing the total number of patients to 108 by the end of 1901, to 241 in 1902, and 390 in 1903, eventually reaching about 1,250 by 1920.
My visit in August 2024 to the Colonia Open Door, in the municipality of Luján, was very interesting and allowed for a better understanding of the evolution of the healthcare complex. Most of the pavilions are now decommissioned. Only one is still occupied by about thirty patients, now called “assisted,” who are responsible for producing bread for internal use, but also distributed to neighboring towns. The central building houses the administration, which is carrying out a project to preserve the memory of this place. In 2024, the restoration and digitization of approximately 12,000 patient files, stored in rooms now designated for the emerging Archivio Storico Colonia Nacional de Alienados (currently H.I.E.N. “Dr. Domingo Cabred”), was started. The current director has stated the intention to seek funding to turn a couple of currently decommissioned pavilions into a museum, in order to honor the significant role this colony played throughout much of the 20th century.
Today, just a few meters from the entrance gate of the facility, there is a small museum (Fig. 6) that preserves the memory of nearly a century of psychiatric activity, through the display of some agricultural tools used in field therapies and administrative documents.

Fig. 6 – Cristina Cilli, Irina Podgorny, and Susana Garcia from the SciCoMove project, together with director Diego Castellano and his colleagues from the Museo Histórico Hospital Dr. Cabred – Colonia Nacional Open Door.
The museum also houses several albums that collect testimonies from Argentine and international political and medical authorities who visited this pioneering institution for the treatment of psychiatric illness in South America at the beginning of the 20th century.
In particular, one of these albums (Fig. 7) contains an entire page of praise from Enrico Ferri, the Italian socialist criminologist and close collaborator of Cesare Lombroso. Ferri’s words are as follows:
“The easy utilization of the insane is the end position. His humane treatment – in the noblest sense of the word – is the starting point.
Honor to those who have been able, in this corner of Argentine soil, to truly connect the starting point with the final goal.
With hope for the better life of humanity!…
Open Door, 26/X/08
Enrico Ferri”


Fig. 7 – Cover of the album containing autographs of the authorities who visited the Colonia Nacional de Alienados Open Door during the XIX Century and the page with praise from Enrico Ferri, dated October 26, 1908. Museo Histórico Hospital Dr. Cabred – Colonia Nacional Open Door (Argentina).
In order to investigate the arrival of the photo album at the Lombroso Museum in Italy, a potential lead emerges from this discovery. Could it have been Enrico Ferri, collaborator and friend of Lombroso, who personally received the two albums during his visit in October 1908? From a dating perspective, we know that some photographs preserved in the Hospicio de las Mercedes album, particularly those related to the Pavilion for criminally insane patients (fig.3), are the same as those published in the thesis by Pedro Lopez Anaut, “Alienados llamados delincuentes (contribution à su estudio)”, presented in 1902 at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, at the Faculty of Medical Sciences.
References:
Compte Rendu des travaux de la Quatrième session (1897). Congrès International d’Anthropologie criminelle, Génève 24-29 Aout 1896.
Cabred, Domingo (1899), “Discurso inaugural de la colonia nacional de Alienados” en Revista de Derecho, Historia y Letras, Bs. As, vol. 1, no 3, 610-11-.
Cabred, Domingo (1900), L’ Open-door et le traitement au lit dans la République Argentine.
Actes du XIII Congrès international de Médicine, Paris.
Iacoponi Lucía (1999), El Hospital Interzonal Colonia Dr. Domingo Cabred y el método Open Door ALCMEON 28 Año X – Vol.7 (http://www.alcmeon.com.ar/7/28/alc28_03.htm)
Marquiegui Dedier Norberto (2017), “Imágenes que condenan. Fotografía e historia vistas desde la perspectiva de las series documentales resguardadas en la colonia nacional de alienados de Open Door, 1901-1930.” XVI Jornadas Interescuelas/Departamentos de Historia. Departamento de Historia. Facultad Humanidades. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Mar del Plata.
Moreno, José Luis (2012), “Un Asilo para los pobres. Los mendigos y sus historias de vida en el Buenos Aires del Siglo XIX”, Rosario, Prohistoria Ediciones.
Vezzetti, Hugo (1987), “Domingo Cabred y el asilo de puertas abiertas” en Vertex. Revista argentina de Psiquiatría, vol 2, no 3.