Escuela de medicina y cirugía de Buenos Aires (1799-1823)
The chairs of medicine and surgery created alongside the Buenos Aires protomedicato, opened in 1801 with nine pupils and no anatomical theatre, no chemistry laboratory and no dissecting instruments — the surgery professor bought those himself. Reorganised in 1813 as a military Instituto Médico, it was still short a surgery chair in the first provincial budget after 1820.
Why this wins its question: Histories of medicine in Argentina usually begin with the 1821 university or with Argerich as a patriotic name, and the colonial licensing tribunal appears, if at all, as an obstacle. This object works from the chapter and the documentary appendix of Gutiérrez's history: the circular that founded the tribunal on the model of Lima and Mexico and required examination before practice, the December 1803 printed list of licensed physicians and the auto against curanderos, the nine pupils of 1801 and the fourteen of 1802, the professor who bought the dissecting instruments himself, the 1813 decree that turned the school into a military body while accusing the old regime of designing American disease, and the salary table of the first provincial budget in which one man held three posts and the surgery chair was vacant.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
A royal act created the Tribunal del Protomedicato at Buenos Aires with the physician Miguel O'Gorman at its head, and the book that reports it gives the year twice, differently: the narrative dates the definitive creation to a real orden of 18 September 1799, while a footnote to the circular reprinted in the same volume's appendix cites the founding act as the real cédula of 18 September 1779. The same narrative records that the tribunal's first installation took place in 1780, when O'Gorman pronounced a Latin oration, and that the Guía de forasteros of 1797 already lists its full staff — protomédico, asesor, fiscal, alguacil, escribano and examiners, Cosme Argerich among them. Both readings are printed here; neither is resolved.
The same royal act that created the tribunal created a chair of medicine and a chair of surgery, naming the protomédico O'Gorman to the first and the licenciado Agustín Eusebio Fabre to the second.
Fabre opened his school of anatomy and surgery at the beginning of March 1801 with nine pupils. Matriculation was conditional: the notice published in the Telégrafo Mercantil in 1802 required candidates to present an information of "vita et moribus" and certificates of having followed courses of philosophy before being admitted at the tribunal of the protomedicato, where the chair was established.
In March of the following year, 1802, the teaching of medicine proper began — not under the protomédico but under Doctor Cosme Argerich, "en virtud de orden superior" in the words of the Guía de Forasteros of 1803 — and Argerich opened his first course with fourteen pupils, five more than had attended the anatomy and surgery class.
The cost side is stated by the same source in the same paragraph as the achievement: two men alone had to dictate every subject of so vast a science, and they lacked a chemistry laboratory, an anatomical amphitheatre, and even the instruments indispensable for dissecting cadavers — so that professor Fabre had to buy those instruments at his own expense.
The first course ended in 1806, and the judgement quoted from the Abeja Argentina is deliberately qualified: from it came out young physicians furnished with knowledge that was not to be expected given the state of letters in the country and the lack of means with which they had been taught.
The circular announcing the creation of the tribunal, reprinted in the appendix and described there as one of the oldest typographic products of the first Buenos Aires press, the Niños Expósitos, states the motive and the model: informed of the disorder and abuses with which medicine, surgery, pharmacy and phlebotomy were practised, "con especialidad en las provincias distantes de esta capital", the authority resolved to establish a Tribunal de Protomedicato "como lo hay en las ciudades de Lima y Méjico, con las mismas facultades, prerrogativas y excepciones", named O'Gorman protomédico and alcalde mayor of all practitioners, forbade anyone thenceforth to practise those arts without having been examined and approved, and ordered every man then passing for physician, surgeon, apothecary or bleeder to present his titles to the local justices, the originals to be forwarded to the tribunal.
The licensing was enforced and published. In December 1803 the tribunal gave notice that on 17 November it had issued an auto against curanderos, inhibiting them under grave penalties from practising medicine and surgery within the city and its surroundings, and that it had passed to the professors of pharmacy the list of physicians and surgeons qualified to practise — three doctors, O'Gorman, Argerich and José Redhead, followed by some twenty licenciados named one by one.
In 1813 the revolutionary assembly gave the medical studies a new organisation, endowing them with five chairs and an anatomical amphitheatre. The Director of the State dictated the regulation, gave the school the title of "Instituto Médico" and the character of a military body, to provide for the better service of the armies of the patria.
The government's own announcement of the new school, printed in the Gaceta ministerial of 1 December 1813 and reprinted in the appendix, is polemic as much as prospectus: it charges "la política antigua" with a barbarous plan of systematic ignorance that included the design of perpetuating every kind of disease in America by impeding the progress of the art of curing them, and then announces that the medical course will begin on 1 March and run six years under the plan approved by the General Assembly. The same volume's narrative dates the school's chairs to the royal act that created the protomedicato, so the accusation and the institution it renames belong to one line of descent; the reader is left the comparison.
The regulation of the medical corps for the service of the armies, 1814, made the arrangement explicit: professors of medicine and surgery destined to the armies formed the Cuerpo de Medicina militar, and since the Instituto Médico of the capital was military, its professors and its pupils were counted as members of that corps, its head being the born director and first Physician and Surgeon Major of the Army.
In spite of these provisions the school's importance declined little by little, and its state was very unflattering at the beginning of 1820 — a fatal year for all political and administrative institutions, and the year in which Cosme Argerich, founder and director of the school, died on 14 February.
The first budget formed by the province of Buenos Aires after 1820 prints the teaching body and what it cost: Cristóbal Montúfar, director and professor of medicine, 1,600 pesos, plus 1,500 as physician and surgeon major of the army and 400 as hospital physician; the chair of surgery vacant at 1,200; Amadeo Bonpland, materia médica, 1,000; Juan Antonio Fernández, medical institutions, 1,000; Francisco Cosme Argerich, anatomy, 1,000 — 7,700 pesos of annual salaries, with one man accumulating three posts while the chair of surgery stood empty.
Amadeo Bonpland, Humboldt's companion on his American journeys, was proposed for the chair of materia médica by the Instituto Médico before the government in February 1821. The government first asked the Instituto whether there was no son of the country able to fill the post, and appointed Bonpland by decree of 23 March 1821 only after being answered with the naturalist's merits and services. The professor Francisco de Paula Rivero protested in the press that the chair, like the others, should be filled by competitive examination, and the press took his side.