Politica, medicos y enfermedades: lecturas de la historia de la salud en la Argentina (review)

Política, médicos y enfermedades: lecturas de historia de la salud en la Argentina. Edited by Mirta Zaida Lobato. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos; Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, 1996. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. 246 pp. Paper.

Mirta Zaida Lobato has brought together a collection of articles on the history of health in Argentina that will be a valuable addition to the published work in this field. Much of the writing that exists on this topic has focused on the rise of public health professionals (higienistas), who functioned as the arbiters of sanitation and pathology between the state and the populace. This volume enhances such an approach with its broadly conceived notion of política, examining the issues of housing, food, education, and work through the prisms of alcoholism, syphilis, tuberculosis, and epidemics. The authors add the ideas of anarchists, socialists, and patients to the opinions of physicians and other professionals whose statements are better studied.

Lobato notes in the introduction that historians began to study this topic relatively late. Although the subject matter has already been plumbed by other disciplines, the field is still ripe for historical investigation. Few contributors in this volume acknowledge or discuss the existing historiography on the topic; in fact, one or two of them seem to be unaware of large parts of it. And yet, the collection is firmly anchored by the contributions of some of the finest social historians working on Argentina today. The chapters move chronologically, from the 1850s with Ricardo Gonzalez Leandri's analysis of the incipient professionalization of medicine in Buenos Aires, through the 1940s with Susana Belmartino's search for continuity between the social programs of Peronism and those of the preceding decades.

The central essays share a concern with alternative discourses on the social diseases linked to urban excess: tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism. Diego Armus focuses on tuberculosis and its association with poor living and working conditions, an association that prompted some anarchist writers to understand the disease as the result of societal injustice, with the inevitable conclusion that the disease could not be eradicated without radical social change. Other anarchists (or the same ones at different times) offered an analysis that shared the emphasis of official science on the individual's responsibility to avoid dangerous behaviors associated with sex and alcohol.

In her research on the Sociedad Luz, an organization of the Socialist Party dedicated to the education of workers, Dora Barrancos uncovered similar concerns. With the same passion that they demanded better industrial hygiene, leaders such as Angel Giménez also campaigned for moderation in the consumption of alcohol and the avoidance of venereal disease. Barrancos goes on to question the extent to which workers themselves shared these concerns and whether improving statistical indices merited such alarmist zeal.

Marcela Nari turns the reader's attention to a different presumed outcome of sexual excess in unwanted pregnancies. Along with a discussion of the ability of porteña women to limit the size of their families, Nari explores higienista anxieties about shrinking fertility on the one hand, and about their concerns whether the "correct" people were having babies, on the other. Medical debates created a new vision of femininity that reduced "woman" to "mother" and imbued her with a variety of characteristics that were then propagated as "natural." Much of the essay concerns poor and single mothers who were unable to attain these ideals.

Beatriz Ruibal's discussion of legal medicine nicely complements other contributions on the earlier corporate structure of health care and demonstrates how successfully medical professionals had insinuated themselves as men of science into numerous branches of the country's administrative elite. Belmartino, as part of a larger discussion about the shifting ideologies of social assistance, looks at the creation of early Peronist social works as a response to the structure of mutualism as it had...