TEACHING SPACES FOR CLINICAL MEDICINE AND EXPERIMENTATION: HOSPITALS AND LABORATORIES IN MEXICO CITY, 19TH CENTURY

Abstract

This essay examines the spatial organization of clinical and experimental medical knowledge in late 19th-century Mexico City. Contemporary historiography takes laboratory knowledge as somehow distinct, just as clinical medicine was not experimentation. Throughout the 19th century, the Hospital de San Andrés was where students at Mexico City’s National School of Medicine (ENM) learned and practised clinical medicine and pathological anatomy. But it was also where spaces for performing experimentation and clinical analyses opened up, in collaboration with the Instituto Médico Nacional. I delve on those hybrid spaces devoted to both medical therapy and experimentation, non-canonical laboratories not studied to date. I analyze how the terrain of the pathological, localized in the body, was multiplied in those heterotopic spaces concerned with clinical practices governed by the urgencies of pain but influenced, as well, by the productivist economy imposed by experimentation. I examines the practices and rhythms that produced distinct kinds of knowledge in those spaces related to the pathologies of Mexican people; though neither one emerged as more efficient than the other. If, however, we view this through the lens of the setting in which they operated (19th-century Mexico City) we find that the clinical and experimental knowledge generated, entrenched in their respective institutions, served the political interests of imposing order, hygiene and contention. In its hospitals and laboratories, the ENM educated in order to domesticate a city immersed in chaotic growth and ravaged by epidemics; a society that sought to transform research into a tool for development, order and healing.