Citation

Otero M. Can. Bull. Med. Hist. 2004; 21(1): 41-71.

Vernacular Title

Le suicide à Buenos Aires: la contribution des médecins à sa "thématisation" comme problème social.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Canadian Society for the History of Medicine, Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

15195662

Abstract

Between 1880 and 1910, a new issue began to concern some in the Argentinean medical community: the increase in the suicide rate. The concept of suicide, till then considered to be an individual and private behaviour, changes noticeably. A group of institutions and discussions would increasingly focus as much on the causes of this apparent rise in the suicide rate as on how to reduce their number. Despite the variety of specialities and orientations of the Argentinean doctors (mental health specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists and sociologists -before such terms were coined) who try to understand the rise in the number of suicides, there is a fundamental issue at the heart of their analyses: the deficient framework- perceived by them as non-existent-for the new behaviours disturbing the social order, or that the very least, the representaion of this order in the doctors' conceptual universe. Is this a social epidemic? An obsession? Or is it just a nutural mechanism of social selection? Around the complex, process of defining the suicide phenomenon as a social problem, medical discourse sheds light on the shaky ground at the limits between the scientific claim to objectivity for certain behaviours at the renewal of the concept of normalcy in modern societies.

Language: fr