Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State (review)

Civilizing Argentina belongs to an important and expanding genre of scholarship that examines the role of science and medicine during Argentina's "Golden Era" of expansion and promise, roughly 1880–1914. Julia Rodriguez follows historians Diego Armus, Donna Guy, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Kristin Ruggiero, Nancy Leys Stepan, and Eduardo Zimmermann (to name just a few) in exploring the dark side of life in modernizing Buenos Aires, marked by a web of socio-medical pathologies such as prostitution, venereal disease, tuberculosis, crime, and insanity. Elite scientists tied to the state, spurred by fears of social disorder and racial decay resulting from rapid immigration, constructed these "abnormalities" through the optic of liberal political theory and positivist science. In this sense, Rodriguez treads familiar historiographic ground, but she goes a step further in arguing that Argentina's "'golden era' itself was tarnished" (p. 3) by its internal contradictions: liberalism and positivism, while superficially progressive, maintained social hierarchy and order through increasingly rationalistic and scientific methods of social control.

The book is ingeniously organized into major parts entitled "Symptoms," "Diagnosis," "Prescriptions," and "Hygiene," corresponding to key stages in the development of scientific mechanisms of social control. Rodriguez skillfully demonstrates that Argentina's elites were obsessed with the quality and coherence of the national "race." Disease and disorder threatened to corrupt an organicist conception of the "body politic." Initially, liberal elites promoted European immigration as a means of race improvement—but this policy backfired because it introduced a new set of social ills and "racial poisons," especially in the slums of Buenos Aires, which teemed with "dangerous" foreign elements. Diagnosing and resolving these problems spawned an alliance of sciences of "social pathology" that melded hygiene, medicine, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and criminology. The protagonists of the story—reformers such as José Ingenieros, José María Ramos Mejía, and Lucas Ayarragaray—moved easily between fields as they created and expanded state institutions of science and social control. Rodriguez makes a valuable contribution by tracing the personal and institutional networks of elite scientists and social reformers, which extended beyond Argentina across the Atlantic, to their peers in Italy and France.

Rodriguez's most novel and well-articulated contribution relates to the development of the science of criminology in Argentina. In the late 1800s much discussion revolved around race- and gender-specific classifications of criminal "types." While some males could be "degenerates" or "born criminals," most leaders in the field concurred that women were by nature incapable of serious crime. Abnormalities of women became more medicalized than criminalized, and "hysteria" became the hegemonic diagnosis of "unruly" women who deviated from their natural role as protector of the family and the home. Meanwhile, the construction of the new National Penitentiary—modeled on prisons in the United States and Britain—symbolized the rationality of reforms aimed at the "moral improvement" of the prisoner. But the most interesting episode reveals the peculiar Argentine obsession with "dactyloscopy," or fingerprinting, as a means of cataloging and monitoring those under the state's control: a measure originally aimed at criminals was gradually expanded to include prostitutes and immigrants; ambitious plans for universal fingerprinting of all Argentines fizzled, however, in the face of widespread opposition.

Such "scientific" efforts at social control are fascinating, but their historical significance may be overstated. Specifically, Rodriguez overreaches in arguing that state science sowed the seeds of Argentina's dramatic and well-known decline from prominence during the latter part of the twentieth century. A "powerful alliance between medicine, science, and state power built this self-destructive modern Argentine political culture"—that is, one that employs false and patronizing progressivism to hide true motives of maintaining social order (p. 255). While such a statement elevates a relatively small class of elite social reformers to a central role in Argentina's political...