Alternate Title

Home Medicine, Remedies And Healers At The Beginning Of The Medicalization Of The Modern City. Buenos Aires, 1870-1940

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Published In

Tempos Históricos

Abstract

The process of medicalization shapes beliefs and practices that saturate health and disease issues in the urban modernity. The rhythms of such medicalization – never completed – are historical, change over time and are uneven in the city social fabric. This article discuss the incipient medicalization of Buenos Aires between the last decades of the 19th century and the first ones of the 20th paying particular attention to three issues: biomedical uncertainties vis-a-vis some diseases that dominated urban morbidity and mortality; the modesty of the urban health collective equipment and the small size of the medical-professional cadres; the agency of the sick, who circulate around several and sometimes complementary health care offerings, from domestic medicine to healers to charlatans.

Keywords

Buenos Aires, medicalization, modernity, healers, medicines

Comments

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