Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983

Abstract

In Madness in Buenos Aires, Jonathan Ablard convincingly demonstrates that Argentine psychiatric institutions were not the agents of social control that Foucauldian scholars have maintained they were in Europe and the United States. While Argentina had the most developed system of mental hospitals in Latin America, according to Ablard a weak state limited these institutions' policing and coercive functions. Buenos Aires's two main hospitals, the Hospital Nacional de Alienadas (for women) and the Hospicio de las Mercedes (for men) attempted to replicate European psychiatric practice, including even having an equal percentage of the national population interned. Nonetheless, lack of funds, ineffective administration, chronic overcrowding, bureaucratic incompetence and the absence of proper legal controls made Buenos Aires's hospitals places where patients were more often neglected than captured by a ‘clinical gaze’. The book is based on meticulous use of primary and secondary sources and is divided into five chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapters 2 to 5 cover the period between 1900 and 1946 and are a comprehensive history of the development and misfortunes of Buenos Aires's two hospitals. These chapters are made compelling by Ablard's skilful use of case histories to illustrate diagnosis, treatment and legal problems of the patients. The last chapter of the book deals with the changes in psychiatry from the time of Perón until the end of the military dictatorship in 1983. Argentina prided itself on its modernity and large European population, yet the conditions that existed in the two Buenos Aires hospitals were similar to those in other Latin American manicomios. In the first decades of the twentieth century, patients often lacked adequate food, clothing and even beds, to say nothing of medical attention. In the early 1930s, the women's hospital had over 3,000 patients in facilities designed for 1,900 and in 1935 the men's asylum had a population of 2,580, more than twice its capacity.