The establishment of the General Directorate of Public Welfare in 1877 allowed for the insane hospitals of Mexico City devote themselves as major areas for the construction of modern mental illness and the development of Mexican mental medicine. In this context, new conceptions of male madness and mental illness were used by the families and the authorities of Mexico City to achieve the confinement of the insane in the Hospital of San Hipólito. Meanwhile, physicians adopted new theories that formed phenomena such as poverty and crime in the catalog of mental disorders.