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

This well-written, well-researched book examines the interaction between social policy, law, and medicine in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from approximately 1880 to 1920—a period during which the city and the nation, under the leadership of liberal elites, embraced European ideas of modernity. Modernity, which in the Argentine case combined a commitment to progress with a growing nationalism, massive European immigration, and rapid urban growth, was accompanied by social ills, crime, and new social pathologies. The country found itself torn between becoming European and preserving its distinct cultural heritage. Kristin Ruggiero frames her research by examining the relationship of modernity (including new scientific ideas and a new social agenda) to individual rights (the flesh), showing why and where these two sets of ideas came into conflict.

Ruggiero studied more than three hundred legal cases; however, she concentrates on the legal, medical, and criminological commentaries generated by a dozen high-profile cases that ran the gamut from adultery and abortion to murder. Although these were criminal cases, the jurists, lawyers, and doctors addressed larger social, moral, and philosophical issues, giving their opinions on the nature of crime, the nature of gender relations and gendered conduct, and the future of their nation. Argentine thinkers were especially fearful of physical, moral, and social degeneration, three types of contagion that were seen as putting the hope of development at risk.

Medical doctors examined those on trial; their task was to evaluate the physical and mental state of the accused and to bring any extenuating circumstances to the attention of the court. Many of these doctors (among them a growing group of psychiatrists, or alienists, as they were then called) had been trained in Europe and were much influenced by positivist ideas that linked criminal behavior to physical traits and inherited constitutional weaknesses. Schooled in French and Italian criminal anthropology, these doctors and like-minded lawyers equated positivism with modernity at the same time that they medicalized criminal behavior. While a handful of critics rejected this new science, arguing that criminals exercised free will and were therefore responsible for their actions, positivists tended to defend those charged with serious crimes by searching for innate proclivities or Lombroso-like physical manifestations of moral and psychological weakness.

Members of the Argentine intelligentsia also believed in social Darwinism, another idea felt to hold the promise of a better future. Contagion was a medical, moral, and social phenomenon, and some thinkers believed that the social function of medicine was to defend the nation biologically. José Ingenieros went so far as to suggest that incurables and degenerates be eliminated in order to protect the nation. Interestingly, while "degenerative" diseases including hysteria, epilepsy, and neurasthenia were feared, these diagnoses were used to justify medical (i.e., hospital) rather than judicial incarceration. At the same time, passion (be it the passion of love, hatred, or honor, or even political passion) was categorized as a pathology, although the demonstration of passion was viewed as positive, human behavior. Passion, like other diseases, became an extenuating circumstance in the commission of a crime, especially if the criminal showed the requisite remorse. Nonetheless, it was increasingly decried as a Latin failing, a hindrance to rationality and a threat to political health.

Ruggiero emphasizes the gendered dimension of many of the modernist medical ideas. Women who committed infanticide were defined as unnatural and monstrous, for they had rejected motherhood, an integral part of every female's nature. Nervous exhaustion in women was classified as hysteria and seen as the result of a wandering uterus; in men, the same disease was called neurasthenia and was closely linked to overtaxing the intellect.

This book is a fine study of the interaction between law and medicine in issues central to modernization, nationalism, society, and development. It deserves a wide audience.