Armus D

Language: Spanish
References: 6
Page: 1448-1462
PDF size: 382.82 Kb.

ABSTRACT

The question that organizes these notes is what to do with the memories of the sick. Memory and memory narratives allow the sick to communicate his experience with the disease. In the process the sick becomes a subject. His testimony is made from the present, carries an inevitable simplification, and demands a high level of consistency, often imposed or largely artificial. At the same time, is a personal testimony, a testimony of someone who has recorded what happened because it is himself, the sick, the one who has lived the disease. The relevance of the individual voice in the socio-cultural history of the disease is saturated with tensions and limitations. Firstly, because the narrative of the sick is not the only source of knowledge about the individual experience of the disease. Secondly, because his narrative is permeated by linguistic, discursive, subjective, and socio-cultural operations, themselves shaped by the social life-experience of the sick, his morals, his religious convictions, his more or less intense exposure to biomedical knowledge and other knowledge and traditions produced outside the realm of science. As a result, and inevitably, the individual memory is also a collective memory, one that most of the time is neither public nor it feeds public memories. Giving to the memory of the sick greater importance than other narratives is problematic because it would recognize in the individual memory of the experience of illness a higher, truth status. Instead, it seems prudent to conclude that what the sick remembers is just a part of a broader socio-cultural history of a certain disease. That history - inevitably incomplete but also contextualized and comprehensive- should be able to shelter subjectivities and macro-historic processes, individuals and social groups, discourses and experiences, and individual and collective memories.

REFERENCES

1. Armus, D. (2005). Legados y Tendencias en la Historiografía sobre la Enfermedad en América Latina Moderna. En D. Armus (Ed), Avatares de la Medicalización en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial.

2. Armus, D. (2007). La Ciudad Impura. Salud, Tuberculosis y Cultura en Buenos Aires entre 1870 y 1950. Buenos Aires: Edhasa.

3. Halbawchs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

4. Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5. Rüsen, J. (2006). Meaning and Representation in History. Bregan: New York.

6. Sarlo, B. (2005). Tiempo Pasado. Cultura de la Memoria y Giro Subjetivo. Una Discusión. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.