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follow externally dictated standards, but rather what their own delusion required, sometimes with the foreseeable consequence that the outer world, hitherto unquestionable, yielded to them. I recall an incident in 1811, when a Revolutionary official whom I would have numbered among our enemies, charged with inspecting our establishment, took an unexpected tumble from his horse during the first days of his visit—though it failed to shuffle him loose the mortal coil, as they say. He commented atthe end of his stay, not inappropriately, that during his recovery at the Casa he had spent all his time trying to distinguish the madmen from the sane, to which my esteemed teacher responded—the usual twinkle in his bright blue eyes, but without receiving even the slightest smile of complicity in return—that when he passed through the streets or halls of Buenos Aires, he was frequently assaulted by the same bewilderment.
    The object of this memoir is not a detailed relation of life in Casa de Salud, but our voyage of 1804, whose scant hundred leagues were multiplied by obstacles, foreseen or unforeseen, that delayed our advance, and by natural phenomena that upset our plans, and by certain unusual episodes that led us more than once to the brink of disaster. But before I tell the story, I want to remark upon the circumstances that led to the Casa’s fall.
    In Madrid, we obtained the necessary authorizations to settle with ease, which can be explained by the fact that the Crown believed each new institution founded in the colonies helped to solidify its presence there. It is also explained by the ignorance of nearly all the Court officials regarding our area of expertise and the manner in which we thought to exercise it, even though Dr. Weiss had been partly inspired by the example of some doctors in Valencia who had practiced a more humane treatment of madness during the previous century. To this I might add the fact that we had to pay a tax because, in truth, taking into account the financial state of practically every European monarchy, it always sped proceedings along. Besides, convinced of the nonexistence of anything outside their purview, the dignitaries believed there were no madmen in America with families able to pay for someone to look after them, so in their private counsel they doubtless thought that Dr. Weiss and I were two naïfs, ready and willing to squander his fortune on a half-cocked undertaking destined for failure. But when the long white rectangle opened its doors at the feet of thethree acacia trees and the patients began to flock in, local dignitaries began to take us seriously and, when word of our novel methods spread, public opinion split over their seriousness, their efficacy, and even their decency. The Church for example, which granted itself power in the colonies of which it would never dare dream in the motherland, sought to judge how patients should be treated, requiring Dr. Weiss’s inexhaustible patience and cleverness, ever-ready to overcome any difficulties. During our private deliberations, the doctor told me that, for the moment, a direct confrontation with the clergy would be unproductive and not without danger, and that the best way to fight them was to proceed with our scientific work without making concessions; but, at the same time, even when we ought to have avoided provocation, he was unwilling to renounce his ideas. When the Revolution came years later, we hoped it would also come for us and that our work would finally be recognized, but many of its supporters were no different from its enemies in terms of political, scientific, and religious views. The wars that followed did little more than exacerbate the situation: The civil war was already brewing in the wars for independence, and one might even say that the first battles of the war for independence were in fact a sort of civil war, for those killing each other were the same as those who, five or six years