Popular medicine in the Buenos Aires countryside through two judicial cases in the mid-19th century.

Abstract

The analysis of judicial documentation is a way of delving into the rural societies of the mid-19th century in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Cases of the illegal practice of medicine or quackery provide insight not only into the most common medical practices of these healers but also into the cultural, social and, in some cases, political spectrum of the societies in which they operated. The following article aims to show a little of all this and to reflect on how state institutions and their agents supported or not the actions of the quackery in two localities in the province of Buenos Aires, Puan and Barracas del Sud, in the face of an onslaught by the nascent medical corporation.