Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina (review)

Modernity in the Flesh makes an important contribution to an increasingly substantial historiography on legal and medical discourses and practices as constitutive elements in the formation of national identities in turn-of-the-century Latin America. Ruggiero's book revolves around the analysis of 341 lengthy court cases from Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1910. But it uses those cases to explore major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European developments in the emerging social sciences and Argentine efforts to bend and shape those developments into a national project. As for much of Latin America, this period in Argentine history was the heyday of liberal democratic ideals and oligarchical political practices as classic liberalism engaged in an ideological struggle with positivist notions of social development that often meshed nicely with the need to legitimize the undemocratic tendencies of oligarchy. Ruggiero's work brilliantly captures the conflicted spirit of the times.

Two themes/theses structure Modernity in the Flesh. The first involves one of the fundamental (constitutive) tensions of modernity, the "contradiction" between respect for individual rights and concerns about social welfare. In modernizing Argentina, the latter generally predominated. "More than democratic government and respect for individual rights," Ruggiero argues, "modernity meant a raised consciousness of the public good and a commitment to science as the warranty of progress" (2). Indeed, her book documents various attempts by jurists, lawyers, medical doctors, politicians, social scientists, et al., most of them connected in some way to the Argentine state, to subordinate individual rights to the public good—wives to their husbands, pregnant women to national reproduction, personal privacy to national security (in the name of public health), and so on. The exception to the rule appears to have been passion (usually in men rather than women), which most commentators, including judges in criminal trials, considered to be a noble if sometimes wayward sentiment—in part because it was associated with Latin-ness and, by extension, with Argentine national identity—that warranted a certain degree of leniency on the part of the criminal justice system.

The second theme/thesis revolves around the distinction between carne (flesh) and cuerpo (body) in the legal and medical literature of the period. Ruggiero argues that flesh became "a signifier of the ambivalence felt about modernity in a postcolonial Third World country" because "the body could be circumscribed but the flesh spilled over" (3–4). Excesses of the flesh represented—at least to policymaking elites—a potential site of resistance to state-sponsored social engineering and thus required constant surveillance and management.

Ruggiero's first theme/thesis is carefully documented and convincingly argued. The second is provocative but not sufficiently developed to judge its usefulness—in large part because "the flesh" appears to have been a promiscuous signifier that served to overdetermine arguments about everything from wayward female sexuality to unrestrained male passion, without necessarily proving definitive or essential (as the second thesis would seem to imply).

Over the course of six thematic chapters, Ruggiero provides an astonishing amount of information about, and insights into, turn-of-the-century Argentine debates about honor (mostly male), shame (mostly female), infanticide, abortion, contagion (moral and biological), degeneration (moral and biological), and passion. Along the way, readers are treated to fascinating excursions into sub-topics like the seclusion or "depositing" of unruly women; the fingerprinting of criminals, prostitutes, immigrants, and, on occasion, ordinary citizens (a process pioneered in Argentina); the social meaning of degenerative diseases like hysteria, epilepsy, and neurasthenia; and national concerns about rising suicide rates and the death penalty. These sub-topics, in themselves, make this book well worth reading.

As an interdisciplinary study, Modernity in the Flesh is a marvel. In order to explicate her court cases, Ruggiero tackles a broad spectrum of European and Argentine social sciences: sociology, criminology, penology, psychology, psychiatry, and law, to mention only the most central. Other historians have had similar ambitious, but she manages...