Neurasthenia

Modernity in the Flesh: Medicine, Law, and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina, by Kristin Ruggiero. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004. x, 244 pp. $49.50 US (cloth).

Kristin Ruggiero's Modernity in the Flesh is a fascinating study of the struggle of jurists, attorneys, and medical doctors to modernize turn-of-the-century Argentinean society. Through a detailed and rigorous analysis of criminal cases and their commentaries, Ruggiero shows how medical, legal, and state professionals struggled to adapt European positivism and criminal anthropology to a changing Latin American reality and, in the process, to consolidate liberal democracy. She presents a story of conflicts and contradictions, emphasizing the ways in which Argentines negotiated and reconciled the tensions between European positivism and vernacular traditions of honour and shame, between individual rights and public good, and between new immigrants and native residents. The book tells the story of how Argentines attempted to resolve these tensions by recognizing the power and influence of the "flesh" (carne) and passion on people's characters and actions.

Modernity in the Flesh gives a comprehensive view of turn-of-the-century Argentinean society, unfolding the sufferings, crimes, and intimate lives of its increasingly diverse and changing population. As Argentines attempted to build a modern society and assimilate a new immigrant population, they faced the challenge of how to control and explain the behaviour of women, immigrants, and people who suffered from a degenerative disease or were considered morally degenerate. Ultimately, they were concerned with building a morally and physically healthy Argentinean race by controlling, eliminating, or isolating those elements that because of their gender, race, heritage, or physical and moral characteristics posed a serious threat to society. To do so, jurists, medical doctors, and public authorities adapted new European scientific and criminology theories to the local reality and made efforts to extirpate undesirable elements from society. This was an urgent mission given their concern about contagion and degeneration.

The book is clearly organized in six chapters. Chapters one and two focus on the public discourse toward women, showing how a new scientific consensus on the inequality, inferiority, and immorality of women was used to justify women's subordination to their families, husbands, and public good. These same ideas, Ruggiero argues, influenced, and most of the time mitigated, courts' decisions involving women in cases of divorce, adultery, infanticide, and abortion. In chapter three, Ruggiero analyzes the importance of the theory of contagion in a growing and increasingly diverse city. In turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, intellectuals were concerned about the physical and moral aspects of contagion and its local and international dimensions. Chapter four examines the ways in which degeneration theory shaped the discussion about race. In their efforts to create and improve the Argentinean race, medical doctors and criminologists argued the need to control and isolate people suffering from degenerative diseases such as hysteria, epilepsy, and neurasthenia. In chapter five, Ruggiero deals with one of the largest perceived threats to Argentina's modernization and political and social stability: "the moral degenerate, the person who had no moral sensibility" (p. 144). Although Argentines did not go to the extreme of eliminating "the moral degenerate," they isolated them in prisons and hospitals. The last chapter, chapter six, discusses how the efforts to impose the public good and positivism were mitigated by the recognition of passion. As Ruggiero explains in her conclusion, flesh "was also an important antidote to the increasing utilitarianism and materialism that was threatening to become dominant at the turn of the century. In some ways, the passional person, even when committing a criminal act, was the perfect citizen" (p. 202).

Modernity in the Flesh is a compelling book that clearly explains the contradictions of modernity in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. By looking in detail at criminal cases, Ruggiero is able to provide a persuasive view of the ideas, dilemmas, and straggles of turn-of-the-century Argentines. From a broader perspective, Modernity in the Flesh raises larger historical questions about the process of modernization and the impact of European ideas on a neo-colonial society.

Angela Vergara

University of Texas, Pan American

Copyright Canadian Journal of History Aug 2005
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