Cultura física, performance atlética e higiene de la nación. El surgimiento de la medicina deportiva en Argentina (1930-1940)

Abstract

This article analyzes the formation of a sports-medicine field in Argentina in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. This process is examined from three perspectives: in the first place, it is situated within the context of the diffusion of sports and growing interest in the scientific study of athletic performance. In the second place, it considers the axes around which the debate on physical culture was articulated in Argentina during the period between the wars, with special attention paid to the impact the recreational revolution produced among the medical elite. Finally, in the third place, it explores the process that led to the creation of the present International Federation of Sports Medicine and its repercussions in Argentina and Latin America in general. Combining approaches to the sociocultural history of sports and the circulation of scientific knowledge regarding the body, the analysis emphasizes the constitution of sports medicine as a professional field of applied science in a context of decline of demographic growth, Taylorist concerns about human capital, democratization of consumption and advance of the state.

Keywords

• Sports
• Olympic games
• medicine
• health
• Argentina
• Europe (Thesaurus).