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Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56.1 (2001) 36-67



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Dangerous Minds:
Changing Psychiatric Views of the Mentally Ill in Porfirian Mexico, 1876–1911

Cristina Rivera-Garza


In 1880, when physician José Alvarez introduced the Mexican public to the complexities of the moral treatment—a therapy created by French alienist Philippe Pinel in the wake of the French revolution in which persuasion and gentleness replaced restraint methods—he described psychiatric patientsas “wretched creatures” or “grown up children” who required and deserved the sympathy of society. 1 Only twenty years later, however, psychiatrists and social commentators alike referred to the mentally ill as dangerous individuals whose mental condition imperiled the future of the nation. Julio Guerrero, a lawyer of Porfirian fame, for example, argued that mental pathologies affected the individual’s capacity to engage in the struggle for life, ultimately creating a “morbid group intrinsically condemned to perturb the normal development of society.” 2 He did believe that the mentally ill required medical care, but in a segregated space where neither their families nor society could be damaged. Doubtlessly, this was a dramatic and foundational interpretative shift in the early development of Mexican psychiatry. In examining the concepts of mental illness elaborated by incipient psychiatrists of the late nineteenth century—a time of rapid social [End Page 36] transformation known in Mexican history as the Porfirian era—I argue that the adoption of punitive views of insanity helped legitimize social and gender inequalities resulting from swift industrialization. Informed by the language of degeneration theory, which linked mental derangement to the poor, these views also played a fundamental role in changing the social position of psychiatry from a peripheral discipline of dubious scientific status to a socially sanctioned profession able to provide the state with a standardized language to address medical and social concerns. 3 Official sanction materialized in 1910 when, regardless of the feeble numbers of their ranks, psychiatrists began to work in the monumental facilities of the General Insane Asylum La Castañeda, one of the most expensive projects of the Porfirian era. 4

While similar processes have been detected in the history of psychiatry in Western Europe and the United States, the Mexican commitment to the psychiatric impulse during the late nineteenth century was peculiar in at least three ways. 5 First, even when influenced by theories originated in Europe, early psychiatric writings in Mexico wove interpretations of the national experience in which modernization (or lack thereof) centrally contributed to medical explanations [End Page 37] of insanity, whether as a latent cause of or as a remedy for mental illness. Further, as Nancy Stepan argued for the reception and proliferation of eugenics throughout Latin America, the adoption of degeneration theory among psychiatrists working at Mexican hospitals was hardly a passive process. 6 In fact, the changes I investigate here—from a “soft” understanding of degeneration that contemplated both heredity and social context to a “hard” interpretation that emphasized genetics over society—illustrate the active ways in which experts adapted foreign concepts to changing local conditions.

Second, psychiatry and its languages proliferated at an extremely rapid pace in a society increasingly concerned with identifying, explaining, and ultimately controlling behaviors deemed deviant. Central to these concerns was the mestizo lower class, a racially mixed group of people that, according to most Porfirian experts, carried the worst characteristics of the indigenous and Spanish legacies they combined. 7 Because of their liminal status and their growing numbers in the country at large and in the capital city in particular, poor mestizos became the target of Porfirian policies of social control. Efforts to beautify Mexico City and to inculcate a capitalist work ethic among workers elsewhere serve as cases in point. 8 Through the relocation of the insane asylum in the periphery of the sprawling metropolis and asylum doctors’ praise for the larger social benefits of work therapy, psychiatry contributed significantly to both.

Lastly, Porfirian psychiatrists who accomplished so much in a relatively short time also witnessed the...

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