Death in the City: Suicide and the Social Imaginary in Modern Mexico by Kathryn A. Sloan

Author:Kathryn A. Sloan [Sloan, Kathryn A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520290310
Google: JWUvDgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B06XDPNKY6
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:48:51.796000+00:00

DEGENERATION AND THE MORAL DECLINE OF SOCIETY

Dr. Beard’s discourse on neurasthenia did not address degeneration per se, but Mexican medical specialists agreed with French and German experts, who believed that neurasthenia could lead to national decline.67 Mexican physicians and criminologists looked to Italian Cesare Lombroso to help them understand how societies and individuals could degenerate into barbarity and crime. A positivist, Lombroso placed deep faith in natural science to explain social problems like criminality. He differed from his French colleagues in that he theorized that degeneration not only multiplied in the “dangerous” classes, and would ultimately result in their extinction, but also could be “uncontained . . . scattering forth pathologies” through societies. By the 1890s, Lombroso and his fellow theorists, such as Scipio Sighele, were entertaining the notion of cultural degeneration.68 They believed that certain behaviors and characteristics could infect mass society. This was what they thought was behind copycat suicides and the epidemic of self-murder among impressionable youth. José Olvera, a founding member of the Medical Association of Pedro Escobedo, foreshadowed the ideas of Lombroso in 1869, however he minimized the theories of the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1774–1829), who believed that acquired characteristics or defects like mental illness or alcoholism could alter a person’s genetic material and that these mutations or weaknesses could be passed down to subsequent generations.69 Olvera had less belief in the notion that acquired characteristics could change genetic material. According to Olvera, mental illness resulted from a crisis of la moral, which he defined as encompassing “the soul, psyche or spirit, the mysterious and invisible realm of human experience and motivation that forensic pathology could not adequately capture, explain or describe.”70 Olvera noted the moral decline of Mexican society, noting that young boys had become skilled seducers. He claimed that prostitution, rape, and masturbation had reached rampant proportions in society and that more and more individuals sought excessive levels of material luxuries. Olvera also pointed to the suicide epidemic as a sure sign of the moral decline of Mexican society.71 He and his contemporaries believed neuroses to be a condition of the privileged classes, as laborers worked too hard to suffer mental illness. They contended that the turmoil of the politically unstable mid-nineteenth century could cause weaker minds to break. Olvera dismissed Lombroso’s theory that markers of criminality could be read on a person’s body. On the contrary, he believed that only in-depth interviews and probing for invisible signs of criminality or insanity could provide valuable information.72 Lombrosian ideas had little influence on Mexican psychiatry, especially when it came to racial degeneration. Mexican researchers surmised that the indigenous did not succumb to the influences of modern life and develop mental illness, as their closeness to nature protected them. This fit with the prevailing notion that Mexicans who performed manual labor or lived in the countryside did not commit suicide.73 It was also thought that indigenous peoples’ communal bonds protected them from social alienation.

In research published in 2009, Andrés Ríos Molina found that before

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.