Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State

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Description

After a promising start as a prosperous and liberal democratic nation on the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina descended into instability and crisis. This stark reversal, in a country wealthy in natural resources and seemingly bursting with progress and energy, has perplexed many historians. In Civilizing Argentina, Julia Rodriguez takes a sharply contrary view, demonstrating that Argentina’s turn of fortune isn’t a mystery but quite the ironic consequence of schemes to “civilize” the nation within the name of progressivism, health, science, and public order.

With new medical and scientific information getting back from Europe on the turn of the century, a powerful alliance developed among medical, scientific, and state authorities in Argentina. These elite forces promulgated a political culture in line with a medical model that defined social problems such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through programs of social hygiene. They instituted programs to fingerprint immigrants, measure the bodies of prisoners, place wives who disobeyed their husbands in “houses of deposit,” and exclude or expel other people deemed socially undesirable, including groups such as labor organizers and prostitutes. Such policies, Rodriguez argues, led to the destruction of the nation’s liberal ideals and opened tips on how to the antidemocratic, authoritarian governments that came later within the twentieth century.

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