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

ABSTRACT: ²

In this essay I ask how clinical and experimental knowledge was spatially organized in Mexico at the end of the 19th century. The historiography takes laboratories as spaces distinct and exclusive from hospitals; it is considered that the clinic is not equivalent to experimentation. Throughout the 19th century, the Hospital de San Andrés was the place where students of the School of Medicine practiced and learned clinical and pathological anatomy. But it was also there that spaces were opened for experimentation and clinical analysis, in collaboration with the National Medical Institute. Here I focus on those hybrid spaces of experimentation and therapeutics, non-canonical laboratories, currently unstudied. I analyze how the territory of the pathological, located in the body, multiplies in these heteropic spaces, occupied by clinical practices governed by the urgencies of pain, but crossed by the productivist economy that imposes experimentation. Practices and rhythms that produce, in the same places, different knowledge about the pathologies of Mexicans; none of them proves to be more efficient than the other. But, if we observe them from where they settled, Mexico City, it is visible that this knowledge, clinical and experimental, entrenched in their institutions, served political interests of order, hygiene and containment. From the hospitals and laboratories, the School of Medicine educated to control a city that grew in disorder; besieged by epidemics; a society that sought to make research a tool for development, order and cure.

Keywords:
Hospitals; laboratories; experimentation; clinic; medical knowledge