158 leader. The abolitionists claimed that regulated prostitution was a form of legal slavery and human trafficking (Vázquez, Sifilofobia 88) and was therefore intolerable. Pedro Monlau, as a morally inclined hygienist, had no time for the Reglamento and protested, ―La organización y reglamentación de la prostitución es una cosa inmoral, y por consiguente, antihigiénica, injusta, ilìcita‖ (Castejón, médicos 75). In contrast with many physicians who saw the epidemic of venereal disease in predominantly medical terms, hygienists of the older generation like Monlau remained convinced that it was attibutable to immoral and unhygienic practices, and that it could be abolished with the practice of good hygiene, ―si fuese posible conseguir que nadie abusarse del coito, y que todo el mundo celebrarse este acto atendiendo siempre á los debidos cuidados de limpieza, desaparecercìa el mal venereo‖ (Monlau, pública I 286). The provisions of the Reglamento continued in Madrid throughout Galdós‘s writing career, the legislation only being finally abolished during the Second Republic in 1935 (Nicolás Lazo 632).
d) Forensic Psychiatry
A link between alcoholism and crime was widely accepted as both were seen as the result of hereditary and environmentally induced degeneration (Hauser, siglo 211). Degeneration, insanity and crime had been linked in France by Felix Voisin as early as 1826 (Ackerknecht, short 57). A striking feature of degenerationist interpretations was that they could be held by thinkers with radically different interpretations of the causes of criminal behavior, be they evolutionary, anthropological, hereditarian, environmental or social. The lack of empirical verification of the supposed degenerative process was one of the reasons for its great