Towards an Argentine medicine: science, nation and writing

Hacia una medicina argentina: ciencia, nación y escritura

Objective. this paper inquiries into a series of reflections produced by some of the founding voices of the Argentinian medical discourse between 1850 y 1930; it analyses in the conformation of the discursive object Argentine medicine through its related features, obstacles and challenges; and it examines the meaningful continuities that, all the way through these decades, have become recurrent in its conformation. Materials and methods. the materials are a corpus of medical-institutional discourses produced by Manuel Montes de Oca, Eduardo Wilde, José Ingenieros and Bernardo Houssay. In theoretical-methodological terms, the article relies on the History of Medicine and on the Discourse Analysis, discipline that studies the verbal dimension and the socio-institutional dimension of the discourses, in a simultaneous and reciprocal way. Results and conclusions. the analysis exposes the recurrence of certain elements in relation to the construction of an Argentinian medicine: a) the difficulties to produce and disseminate the local researches, but also the challenges in order to consolidate the authority of a national science; b) the problems with the foreign medicine and also with the foreign doctor; c) in discursive terms, the repetition of similar metaphors to refer the Argentine medicine always as future project: “a page to write”, “a book to write”, “a building to construct”.