[Doctors and madmen in south of Brazil: an overview on the São Pedro Hospice in the city of Porto Allgre/RS, its patients and its practices of madness treatment (1884-1924)].

The São Pedro Hospice was inaugurated on June 29, 1884, and it wa the first psychiatric hospital in Rio Grande do Sul State and one of the first of Brazil, whose history was in a turning point, and it became correlated with the construction of the psychiatry then province. This article presents an abbreviation history of the institution until the decade of 1920, it analyzes the data of the internal population. Moreover, it deals with the medical practices of attendance inside the hospice, which were combined with the development of the "cure" of the subjects, the precepts of the science and the physical and cultural attributes, as well as the experiences of the inpatients' life.