Abstract

The article analyzes the Argentinean medical view along a period when it rose in importance and became the key for the interpretation of society. At the end of the XIX century, an influential group of intellectuals, including José María Ramos Mejía (Las multitudes argentinas, 1899), brought the hygienic issue to the centre of the public scene. The main hypothesis of the present paper is that the medicalization of society, after the Cholera and Yellow Fever epidemics, gave to the elites the opportunity to build legitimate domains of state intervention. But the intrusion of the State into the private sphere was not unproblematic: on the one hand, it provoked the resistance of the population; on the other, it stood in contradiction with the theoretical logic of liberalism.