Mexican Doctors during the Three Last Decades of the 19th Century: Between Vital World and Social World

Abstract

The 19th Century witnessed a significant change in how Western doctors viewed the world. In Mexico, this transformation was evident with special force during the period of the Porfiriato, owing to the attempt at modernization that made possible the positioning of the medicine within the array of knowledge necessary for the State. Within this context, doctors sought to show themselves as subjects of science necessary for this modernization aspiration due to their usefulness in the population management. In consequence, they tried to establish a line between their knowledge and other non-scientific forms of knowledge through the discourse and the enactment of laws, while simultaneously, they used other knowledge that was useful for the development of medicine itself and the expansion of its field of action. Consequently, in this paper we analyze the discourses of Porfiriato’s mexican doctors as an expression of a politics of science that highlights the existing analogy between what Canguilhem called the vital world and the social world due to the search for these to expand their field of action by trying to regulate society. We seek, therefore, to contribute to the understanding of Mexican doctors in the 19th Century and the way in which they related medical knowledge with another forms of knowledge