«Medical deputies»: clinics and politics in the dispute for public resources in Buenos Aires (1906-1917)

Abstract

In June, 1906, the conservative deputy and doctor Eliseo Cantón submitted in the Argentinian Parliament the project of a «big polyclinical hospital», which would take up four blocks, would be located in front of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires and would be made up by 20 institutes with a capacity for 80 beds each. The dispute over this huge project, which lasted until 1917, placed in the middle of the scene, a group of “medical deputies” who used the political platform as a space to define the main aspects of the hospital system. The controversy went beyond the Parliament reaching the public sphere. The lavishness of the project on the eve of the Centenary public festivities or the opulence of a Buenos Aires which aspired to be like Paris were related, in a symbolic view, to the progress of local medicine and its aspirations to be included in the international medical arena. The analysed case helps understand how an essentially political controversy —which led to economical, ethical and cognitive discussions— intervened in the process of bulding up a socio-professional space of the hospital medical practice.