The Chilean psychiatrists, Manuel and Francisco Beca, father and son, who lived at the turn of the XIX century and in the first half of the XX respectively, dedicated their lives to the care of mental patients and to the teaching of psychiatry, contributing in their own way and time to the development of the specialty in Chile. Manuel Beca, a clinician, published the first mental patient statistics and Francisco, an academic, became professor of Psychiatry at the Catholic University. Altough they dedicated themselves to different fields in the area of mental health, such as clinical research and teaching, both have outstanding merits to become a part of the historical memory of Chilean psychiatry (Rev Méd Chile 2000; 128: 827-32).