Estudios científicos y estética literaria. Un análisis del discurso médico-académico en la Argentina (1890-1910)

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific knowledge that guided the research and medical teaching at the University of Buenos Aires forged a closed bond with the literary knowledge. The reference to different literary works, introduced by doctors as Jose Ramos Mejia (1849-1914) or Jose Ingenieros (1877-1925), appeared in genres such as lessons, papers and academic discourses, and encouraged an integral education of the student; a type of education that was not limited to clinical interests only. In addition, the pathological cases from famous fictional characters were constituted as a didactical resource in order to exemplify the explanations of diseases or degenerations studied, in the areas of psychiatry and criminology specially. This paper intends to analyze the conformation of a learned and “litterateur” ethos, within the frame of the Argentinian medical discourse that covers the period 1890-1910, and the ways in which this image was projected to be reproduced by the academic audience. The paper is involved with the French tendencies of Discourse Analysis and uses the theoretical-methodological references from Ruth Amossy (Images de soi dans le discours…, L’argumentation dans le discours, “Nueva retorica y linguistica del discurso”) and Dominique Maingueneau (“Problemes d’ethos”, Doze conceitos em analise do discurso), concerning the categories of ethos (discursive and prediscursive) and audience. The corpus is composed of the same statements made by Ramos Mejia and Ingenieros (thesis, lessons, medical papers). In addition, specific publications of the Revista del Centro de Estudiantes de Medicina (1901-1909) and the Archivos de Psiquiatria y Criminologia (1902-1914) —two foundational magazines of Argentinian medicine during these years— will be considered.