Saberes, terapias y practicas medicas en Argentina (1750-1910) (review)

This is a convincing example of the possibilities and challenges of writing on issues of health and disease from a social and cultural perspective. In a field that continues to produce more and more monographic works, Saberes, terapias y prácticas delves into the complex zone of medical pluralism. Di Liscia works with a broad definition of medicine—not only scientific and academic discourses, practices, and beliefs, but also those that originate in native and popular medicines. She attempts to deal with the tensions and exchanges among the "ideological blocks of scientific, native, and popular medicines" (p. 5 ), and she avoids theoretical constructs that, while perhaps serving as useful tools to bring some order to the reconstruction of historical experience, at the same time are unable to grasp their ambiguities and the gray zone where most dimensions of quotidian life take place.

Di Liscia's agenda has at least two merits I wish to underline. The first is a serious concern for popular medicine—a sensitive discussion that reminds the reader that the triumph of scientific medicine is in no way a linear process, even in the Argentine Litoral, a region that embraced modernity with great energy and success, received millions of immigrants, entered a rapid process of urbanization, and achieved high rates of literacy. These concerns are not new—social and cultural historians are becoming increasingly conscious of them—but Di Liscia is able to weave a convincing narrative based on the less-than-abundant primary sources available. The book's second merit, a truly original contribution, is the incorporation of the problem of native medicine in the Argentine pampas, where Indian issues tend to be discussed as a marginal matter in a historiographical agenda focused on examining the very efficient nation-building policies that sought the extermination of the native population.

Saberes, terapias y prácticas discusses an array of problems and issues, always keeping the narrative focused on the tensions and exchanges among scientific, popular, and native medicines. For the first half of the nineteenth century, the discussion of medical practices—above all regarding smallpox vaccination of Indian groups allied with the Rosas government—is a compelling revision of current interpretations. Equally persuasive is the reconstruction of the immediate post-1853 debates about the Indian problem vis à vis the building of the modern nation, discussions in which can be heard some elite voices interested in exploring and understanding Indian medicine potentials. Di Liscia also discusses the discourses that tended to justify the ethnic elimination of the Indians—a topic well worked by historians—and the way the fatal consequences of their diseases were interpreted by the modernizing elite, a truly novel dimension in historiographical terms.

The author is very imaginative working with diverse medical options with origins outside of certified medicine but obviously present in people's daily lives during most of the nineteenth century, times in which the medicalization of society was nascent, and the scientific medical therapies available were largely as ineffective as the alternatives. It is this context that allows the author to explore a number of processes that show a contradictory scenario marked, among others, by the efforts of established physicians trying, to a certain extent, to incorporate popular medicines and practices into the scientific medical realm. She discusses the beginnings of a medical folklore as a "national" discipline that will present in a positive light curanderos criollos, the difficulties in imposing scientific medicine as the only respectable medicine in a liberal period, the relative tolerance or acceptance of competing medical practices by some physicians and certainly the society in general, at the same time when other professionals were insistently constructing the image of the curandero as a dangerous criminal.

The book ends with a general chapter focused on the relative triumph of the medicalization process, an outcome of the relatively successful antiepidemic efforts launched in the...