Abstract

The legal medicine in Chile was closely related to the Morgue of Santiago, founded in approximately 1879. In this place served the city physician Eduardo Lira Errazuriz (1854-1911). By means of the autopsies that practical, between the years 1893 and 1905, it is possible to observe the professionalization of the legal medicine that, in part, responded to the institutionalization and the recognition of the State as the object of the application of justice within the framework of a process of modernization and secularization of society. The professional practice of Dr. Lira allows us to review their practices in the context of a catholic culture, where life and death were part of historic events, but which is now open to scientific categories, recognizing in them the fundamental elements for the organization and the social order, within a confessional State.