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Harvesting Cholera: Fruit, Disease and Governance in the Cholera Epidemic of Tucumán, Argentina, 1867–68

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2016

CARLOS S. DIMAS
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Abstract

In 1868 a cholera epidemic erupted in the north-western Argentine province of Tucumán. Urban-based doctors and politicians argued that fruit cultivated primarily in the south of the province was responsible for the spread of cholera. Hoping to avoid cholera, they advocated the complete prohibition and destruction of fruit in Tucumán as both a prophylactic measure, but also to prepare new land for sugar cultivation. Through a reading of governmental memos, medical journals, and public health reports, this article examines how agriculture, disease, and contagion mediated the interaction between Tucumán's urban minority and rural majority. This article offers a window into grassroots politics and state formation during one of Argentina's most formative periods.

Spanish abstract

En 1868 surgió una epidemia de cólera en la provincia noroccidental de Tucumán, Argentina. Doctores y políticos urbanos argumentaron que el cultivo de fruta, localizado mayoritariamente en el sur, había propagado la enfermedad. Con la esperanza de evitar el cólera, apoyaron la completa prohibición y destrucción de la fruta de Tucumán como medida profiláctica pero también para desarrollar nuevas tierras para el cultivo de caña de azúcar. A través de una lectura de informes gubernamentales, revistas médicas e informes de salud pública, este artículo examina cómo la agricultura, junto a la enfermedad y su propagación, mediaron la interacción entre la minoría urbana y la mayoría rural en Tucumán. El material ofrece una ventana para evaluar las políticas de base y la formación estatal durante uno de los períodos más formativos de Argentina.

Portuguese abstract

Em 1868, uma epidemia de cólera eclodiu na província de Tucumán, noroeste da Argentina. Médicos de áreas urbanas e políticos argumentaram que a doença foi disseminada por frutas que cresciam principalmente no sul da província. Na esperança de evitar a cólera, eles defenderam a proibição completa e destruição de frutas em Tucumán como medida profilática, mas também como forma de liberar novas áreas para o cultivo de açúcar. Através da leitura de memorandos governamentais, revistas médicas e relatórios de saúde pública, este artigo examina como questões sobre agricultura, doença e contágio mediaram a interação entre a minoria urbana e a maioria rural de Tucumán. O artigo oferece uma perspectiva acerca das políticas de base e da formação do Estado durante um dos períodos formativos mais intensos da Argentina.

Keywords

choleraenvironmentTucumánfruit cultivationstate formationcóleramedio ambienteTucumánfrutaformación estatalcólerameio ambienteTucumáncultivo de frutasformação de Estado
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 115 - 142
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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2 Equivalent of counties.

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16 ‘Report on the Epidemic Cholera Morbus as it Visited the Territories Subject to the Presidency of Bengal in the Years, 1817–1819’, in Tom Koch (ed.), Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 95.

17 Revista Médica Quirúrgica, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Pablo E. Coni, 1866), pp. 370–1. Hereafter RMQ.

18 La Revista Farmaceutica, vol. 7 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Pablo E. Coni, 1869), pp. 126–34. Hereafter LRF.

19 Carl von Voit, Max von Pettenkofer zum Gedächtniss: Rede im Auftrag der mathematisch-physikalischen Classe der K. G. L. Bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften in München in der öffentlichen Sitzung am 16. November 1901 (Munich: Akademie, 1902.) pp. 90–2.

20 Thomas M. Logan, Malarial Fevers and Consumption in California’, Third Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California for the Years 1874 and 1875 (Sacramento, CA: Superintendent State Printing, 1875), p. 115. Quoted in Thompson, Kenneth, ‘Insalubrious California: Perception and Reality’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 59: 1 (1969), pp. 50–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Nash, Inescapable Ecologies, p. 25.

22 Lucio Del Castillo, Enfermedades reinantes en la campaña del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Mercurio, 1870) pp. 15–27.

23 RMQ 1868, vol. 5 ‘Cholera Morbus and its Rational Treatment’, p. 125.

24 RMQ 1867, vol. 4 ‘Buenos Aires Hygiene Commission to the Municipality’, pp. 7–9.

25 Ibid. , The International Sanitary Conference 1865 Proceeedings: Discussion Point XXXI. p. 359.

26 The basis for associating disease with the ground was espoused by the German hygienist Max Von Pettenkofer (1818–1901). As Robert Koch's main rival, Von Pettenkofer developed his X, Y and Z factors on cholera. In this theory, X being the disease, was only able to spread when Y, local soil conditions and ground water, combined in Z, a personal susceptibility to certain diseases. What separated Von Pettenkofer from Koch was that Y was the most important variable. Miasmas, decomposed material and faecal matter all seeped into the ground and fermented. Local patterns of agriculture or construction could release these underground poisons to the general public. LRF, 1867, vol. 5, p. 235.

27 El Orden, 12 January 1887.

28 ‘Cholera’, The British Medical Journal, 2: 250 (1865), p. 399 Google Scholar.

29 Annual Report of the National Board of Health for the year 1885 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), p. 138.

30 Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, Stories in the Time of Cholera Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

31 George Rosen, The History of Public Health (New York: MD Publications, 1958), p. 17 and 109, quoted in Dorothy Porter (ed.), The History of Public Health and the Modern State (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994), p. 1.

32 Mitman, Gregg A. and Numbers, Ronald L., ‘From Miasma to Asthma: The Changing Fortunes of Medical Geography in America’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 25 (2003), pp. 391–412 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

33 International Sanitary Conference 1866, Constantinople, Turkey. Report to the International Sanitary Conference of a Commission from That Body, to Which Were Referred the Questions Relative to the Origin, Endemicity, Transmissibility and Propagation of Asiatic Cholera (Boston, MA: Alfred Mudge & Son Printers, 1867) p. 61.

34 ‘El microbio del cólera: revista crítica’, Anales del círculo médico argentino, vol. IX (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de M. Biedma, 1886), p. 54.

35 José Roque Ávila, Historia del cólera en la provincia de Tucumán. Tésis (Buenos Aires: Imprenta, Litografia y Encuadernación de Stiller y Laass, 1887) and Diego García, El cólera: estudio preparado sobre observaciones recogidas en Tucumán en la última epidemia. Tésis (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Pablo E. Coni é Hijos, 1887).

36 Carter, Enemy in the Blood.

37 Julio Roca to his brother Ataliva Roca, 19 Nov. 1869. Quoted in Donna Guy. Argentine Sugar Politics, p. 9.

38 Octavio Luna to the Provincial Legislature in Miguel Lizondo Borda, Historia del Tucumán (siglo XIX) (Tucumán, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1948), pp. 97–104.

39 For a discussion of the cart industry and Tucumán's economy in the late colonial period see Jonathan Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) chaps. 1 and 2.

40 Juárez Dappe, When Sugar Ruled, pp. 17–18.

41 Claudia Herrera, ‘Fiscalidad y poder: las relaciones entre el estado Tucumano y el estado central en la formación del sistema político nacional, 1852–1869’, in Beatriz Bragoni and Eduardo José Míguez (eds.), Un nuevo orden político: provincias y estado nacional, 1852–1880 (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2010), pp. 181–208.

42 Juárez Dappe, When Sugar Ruled, pp. 36–8.

43 1 arroba = 25lbs.

44 José Antonio Sánchez Román, La dulce crisis: estado, empresarios e industria azucarera en Tucumán, Argentina (1853–1914) (Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla, 2005), p. 37.

45 Arsenio Granillo, Provincia de Tucumán (Tucumán: Impr. de La Razon, 1872), p. 64.

46 Eric Carter examines how water in eastern Tucumán became especially crucial to the development of the sugar industry before and after the crisis of overproduction of 1895.

47 Data collected from Memoria del Ministerio del Interior 1869, p. 53. The percentages are Tucumán 80, Santiago del Estero 85, Catamarca 28, Salta and Jujuy 76.

48 Primer censo de la republica Argentina: 1869 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Porvenir, 1872). pp. 506–9; Ricardo González Leandri, Curar, persuadir, gobernar: la construcción histórica de la profesión médica en Buenos Aires, 1852–1886 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1999), pp. 18–23.

49 Steven Palmer, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

50 Elaine G. Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

51 Report on the construction of a road from Catamarca to Salta through Tucumán Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Tucumán Sección 1865, Book 97, Folio 124. Hereinafter referred to as AHT-SA.

52 The Chief Regiment of the 6th Division in Trancas to Minister Bernabé Piedrabuena, 1 January 1865 AHT-SA 1865. Book 97, folio 14.

53 Taylor was an American anthropologist who conducted fieldwork on ‘rural life in Argentina’ in the 1940s. Rural Life in Argentina (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1948) and Émile Daireaux, Vida y costumbres en el Plata (Buenos Aires: F. Lajouane, 1888), pp. 440–1.

54 Hermann Burmeister. Descripción de Tucumán (Buenos Aires: Coni hermanos, 1916).

55 Daireaux, Vida y costumbres en el Plata, pp. 435–41.

56 Primer censo de la república Argentina: 1869, p. 489.

57 Alfredo Bolsi (ed.), ‘El complejo azucarero en Tucumán: dinámica y articulaciones: censos nacionales agropecuarios’ (San Miguel: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán-CONICET, 2002), CD-ROM.

58 Harry Alverson Franck, Working North from Patagonia: Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America (New York: The Century Co., 1921), pp. 58 and 85.

59 Malaria was especially abundant and problematic in Tucumán. Carter, Enemy in the Blood.

60 Paul Groussac, Memoria histórica y descriptiva de la provincia de Tucumán (Buenos Aires: Impr. de M. Biedma, 1882), p. 704.

61 Ibid.

62 Daireaux, Vida y costumbres en la Plata, p. 427.

63 Carter, Enemy in the Blood, p. 39.

64 Marco A. Maciel (ed.), Digesto municipal: compilación de ordenanzas, resoluciones, memorias y decretos de a municipalidad, a partir del año 1868. Tomo IV (Tucumán: Edición Oficial, 1924), p. 428.

65 Octavio Luna to the Provincial Legislature, Lizondo Borda, Historia del Tucumán (siglo XIX), pp. 97–104.

66 For example, Eudoro Avellaneda, brother of future president Nicolás Avellaneda, married Francisca Delfina Terán Silva, daughter of Juan Manuel Terán. Through the marriage, the Terán and Avellaneda families consolidated the Los Ralos sugar mill and formed a loose coalition with the Santa Bárbara and Luján sugar mills. See Claudia Herrera, ‘Los Avellaneda: herencia, poder en la elite Tucumana’, unpublished paper for the Segundas Jornadas Nacionales de Historia Social, Córdoba, Argentina 2009, p. 19.

67 José Posse, for example, maintained an almost 50-year personal correspondence with Sarmiento. Nicolás Avellaneda was given the Ministry of Education and Justice during Sarmiento's presidential administration and then was chosen to succeed him as president (1874–80).

68 José Posse to Domingo Sarmiento, 20 June 1868, vol. 1: Epistolario entre Sarmiento y Posse, 1845–1888 (Buenos Aires: Museo Histórico, 1946), p. 172. Paula Alonso's Jardines Secretos advances the notion of political leagues in the post-1880 period, while David Rock, in State Building argues that each decade from 1860–1916 political history revolved around either one person, or the conflict between two. For the 1860s, Rock argues that Mitrismo had a tight control over regional politics, but in 1868 with the election of Sarmiento, his influence began to quickly fade and never reached the level it had prior to 1862.

69 Ibid. , 15 Nov. 1868.

70 During his two-year administration, Luna temporarily delegated his role as governor to his Minister of Government David Zavalia five times in order to quell uprisings or to monitor conditions in the interior. Antonio Zinny, Historia de los gobernadores de las provincias argentinas (Noroeste) (Tucumán: Fundación Banco Comercial del Norte, 1974), pp. 360–1.

71 ‘We should not make a direct opposition [against Luna] but instead find ways to completly disarm the ill will of the government, accept the position and promote the public good and prepare the way for the future elections to recuperate power’, Domingo F. Sarmiento to José Posse, Buenos Aires, 21 Oct. 1868, vol. 1: Epistolario entre Sarmiento y Posse, 1845–1888 (Buenos Aires: Museo Histórico, 1946), p. 187.

72 Patente is a tax dating back to the colonial period that taxed all forms of economic activity: commercial, agricultural, professional and industrial.

73 Between 1856 and 1870, the average genuine income (patentes, sales, and property tax) for the province was Bs. $ 51,500 pesos. for 1868, only the estimated income is available: Bs. $ 66,644. Taken from Herrera ‘Fiscalidad y poder: las relaciones entre el estado Tucumano y el estado central en la formación del sistema político nacional, 1852–1869’, chart 1, p. 191 and chart 2, p. 201.

74 Ibid. , p. 199 and footnote 55.

75 Finalised budget for 1865. AHT-SA 1865; 98: 345.

76 Letter from Feofamia L. De Espejo to Gov. Octavio Luna. AHT-SA 1867; 102: 387.

77 El Eco de Córdoba, Dec. 1867– Jan. 1868. An article from 4 Jan. 1868 illuminates the disagreement between the Church and the government, ‘Catholicism has cures and medicine that are effective and healthy for every affliction of the soul; it could be that the medical assistance has not found the proper way of caring for the sick. Conversely, religious leaders are abundant and have not left any individual unattended, fortifying the word of the religious ministry. What does it matter if you are well-connected with friends in important places, if He is the one who gives us eternal health? Those that are happy are the ones who with their last breath have invoked the help of God immortal.’

78 María Estela Fernández informed me that in the parish death records of San Miguel for 1860–70, cholera is not listed as a cause of death. See Parolo, María Paula, Campi, Daniel and Fernández, María Estela. ‘Auge azucarero, mortalidad y políticas de salud en San Miguel de Tucumán en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’, Estudios Sociales, 38: 1 (2010), pp. 39–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 El Pueblo, 16 Feb. 1868.

80 Ibid. , 23 Feb. 1868.

81 Ramón Cordeiro, Carlos Dalmiro Viale, Horacio Sánchez Loria, Ernesto M. del Moral, Samuel Eichelbaum, Felin Linares Alurralde, and Martin Manso, Compilación ordenada de leyes, decretos y mensajes del período constitucional de la Provincia de Tucumán que comienza en el año 1852 (Tucumán: Imprenta de la Cárcel Penitenciaría, 1916), pp. 22–3.

82 El Pueblo, no date visible.

83 Letter from the Municipality of San Miguel to Gov. Octavio Luna AHT-SA 1868; 104: 259.

84 El Pueblo, 1 March 1868.

85 El Pueblo, 16 Feb. 1868.

86 Ibid.

87 Letter from the Municipality of San Miguel to Gov. Octavio Luna AHT-SA 1868, 105: 122.

88 Information compiled from AHT-Pueblos del Interior portfolio.

89 Agriculture of the department of Graneros listed in the 1869 census, p. 487.

90 Letter from the commissary of La Cocha to Gov. Octavio Luna. AHT-SA 1868;104: 370.

91 Ibid. , 104: 128.

92 The First Committee of Colalao to Gov. Octavio Luna, AHT-SA1868; 104: 222.

93 The Head of the 6th regiment in Medinas to Gov. Octavio Luna, AHT-SA 1868; 104: 377.

94 Public health and prophylactic decrees of Wenceslao Posse, AHT-SA 1868;105: 190.

95 José Posse to Gaspar Taboada, 23 Jan. 1868. Gaspar Taboada, Recuerdos históricos: ‘los Taboada’: luchas de la organización nacional: documentos seleccionados y comentados, vol. 5 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta López, 1929), pp. 308–9.

96 Ibid., p. 305.

97 The tension between popular and traditional medical officials appears as early as the late colonial period and once again during the 1886 epidemic. In 1886, the government of Tucumán persecuted and jailed various curanderos over charges that they spread false medical advice and sold diluted medication. One prominent curandero, famous in areas as far as Mendoza, was jailed after giving medicine that resulted in the death of a child.

98 Report from José Sobre to Gov. Octavio Luna, AHT-SA 1868; 104: 301.

99 Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Pensamiento Latinoamericano, Encuesta Nacional de Folklore (1921): File Tucumán, carpeta 23: Town of Río Colorado.

100 Ibid. , file: Catamarca, carpeta 79: town of Capayán.

101 Armando M. Pérez de Nucci, La medicina tradicional del noroeste argentino: historia y presente (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones del Sol, 1988). pp. 76–85.

102 The Taboada family in Santiago del Estero and Anselmo Rojo of Tucumán are two ideal examples.

103 Public decree by Wenceslao Posse AHT-SA 1868; 105: 190. Italics my own.

104 Héctor Recalde, Las epidemias de cólera (1856–1895): salud y sociedad en la Argentina oligárquica (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1993) and Olga N. Ordi de Ragucci, Cólera e inmigración, 1880–1900 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán, 1992).