Cuerpos heridos, conocimiento y verdad: las heridas entre la medicina y la jurisprudencia

• Main Author: Laura Cházaro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2006-11-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: legal medicine; juridical truth; imputation of guilt
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/2981

In this article, I analyze the notion of “body” from the perspective of the “classification of wounds” discussed by mid-19th-century Mexican doctors and jurists who, in order to cure as well as to judge, used the bodies as a source of knowledge and of medical or criminal proof. I examine the differences and continuities between those two conceptions of the body –one based on legal codes, the other on medicine– and ask whether the two postulate distinct bodies, or if we can accept the worrying vision of bodies as “materiality” in discussion. Bodies are not considered “material” units whose nature was defined preliminary. The borders and limits of the body’s “materiality” seem to be linked to laws and norms postulated in legal codes and by the clinic practice during the debate between the wounded, the doctor and the judge.