Abstract

As part of the discourse of progress and the promises of science, hygiene as a discipline has been playing the role of a great advisor, a sort of expert in the art of observing, correcting, improving and trying to change the health of the social body and the modern nation. In that context hygiene even imagined alternative or utopian cities. Emilio Coni, perhaps the most distinguished Argentine hygienist of the end of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th, imagined one of such cities. The following notes aim at contextualizing his "Argentine ideal city". The original version of Coni's text, published in La Semana Médica on April 3, 1919, is also included.