Politics of knowledge: the silence of Mexican obstetricians about race and gender in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

I have found that in the mid-nineteenth Century Mexico, the notions of race and sex became objects for science and favored the production of medical knowledge, and so it happened with obstetrics. In the corpus of medical records kept by Mexican obstetricians of the National Academy of Medicine (1864), some pathologies began to be explained by the racial origin and the sexual category of the patients. The association between pathologies, races and sexes was not foreign to European medical knowledge, and the knowledge produced in Europe was the point of reference to define what was normal and what was pathological as well as what was science and what was not. This text questions the way in which doctors, while producing knowledge, reproduce post-colonial political hierarchies which in turn reproduce ignorance and racism. Among doctors, to produce knowledge implies the authority of the diagnosis and the silence of the patients, but it also entails the silence of Mexican doctors before European knowledge. Thus, obstetrics as knowledge about the female sex that is marked by the racial origin of their people is translated into a measure of the doctors’ ignorance in marginal territories, and so it is diminished when compared to the knowledge produced in scientific centers.