Marcelo Sánchez Delgado holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Chile and is currently an academic at the Center for Latin American Cultural Studies CECLA and the Department of Historical Sciences of the University of Chile. Between 2016 and 2022 he was Editor of Meridional Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos. In 2014 he was invited to the Brown International Advanced Research Institute of Brown University, United States. He is a member of the Ibero-American Network of History of Psychiatry. He has done research internships at the CSIC in Madrid and at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin.

Based on historical research on the eugenic project in Chile and Latin America he has developed lines of research on the history of medicine, evolutionism, criminology and criminalistics, psychiatry and health and disease.

 

Publications (selection)

Books (including co-editions)

2016 (ed.). República de la Salud. Fundación y ruinas de un país sanitario. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros editores, 2016.

2015 (ed.) Bulevar de los pobres. Racismo científico, higiene y eugenesia en Chile e Iberoamérica, siglos XIX y XX. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros editores, 2015.

 

Journal artículos and book chapters:

2022. ”Trabajar al otro lado del río”: El inacabado proyecto de tratamiento de la enfermedad mental en Chile. De la Casa de Orates al Hospital Psiquiátrico (1852-1950)” Mariano Ruperthuz, Marcelo Sánchez y Ana Gálvez, en Ríos, A. y Ruperthuz, M. (eds.). De manicomios a instituciones psiquiátricas, Madrid, Sílex Ediciones, pp. 141- 205.

2021. “Las Casas de Limpieza: antecedentes y funcionamiento en la epidemia de tifus exantemático en Chile a inicios de la década de 1930”, co escrito con Seiwerth y Abarzúa. Historia 396, Vol. 11 N°1, 327-360. Disponible en http://www.historia396.cl/index.php/historia396/article/view/504/208.

2020. “Chile y la COVID-19: el caso de un Estado mínimo y de un gobierno sin legitimidad política”, en Ricardo Campos, Enrique Perdiguero-Gil, Eduardo Bueno (eds.), Cuarenta historias para una cuarentena: reflexiones históricas sobre epidemias y salud global, Madrid: Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina, pp. 218-222.

2020. “Ausencia y presencia del Museo de Anatomía Patológica de la Universidad de Chile (1880 1948)”. Aula, Museos y Colecciones, 7, 123-137. Revista publicada por la Real Sociedad Española de Historia Natural. Disponible en http://www.rsehn.es/publicaciones-aula/art491.

2020. “Una discusión sobre el vínculo entre Salvador Allende, Max Westenhöfer y Rudolf Virchow: aportes a la historia de la medicina social chilena e internacional”,  co escrito con Eric Carter. História, Ciências, Saúde– Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, v.27, n.3, jul.-set.  https://www.scielo.br/j/hcsm/a/wJ9yxcDsFzzbZhz7FTMkmBk/?format=pdf&lang=es. Disponible en inglés.

2020. “Griegos, latinos y germanos en algunos escritos racistas y eugénicos chilenos de la primera mitad del siglo XX” co escrito con Enrique Riobó. Historia (Santiago),  Santiago , v. 53, n. 1, p. 183-210, jun.   Disponible en https://scielo.conicyt.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0717-71942020000100183&lng=es&nrm=iso.

2019. “Decálogo sobre migraciones para un Estado eugénico racista Latinoamericano”, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Colloques, mis en ligne le 08 octobre 2019, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/77114.  Colloques 2019 Cuerpo y viaje en sujetos migrantes – Coord. Paula González y Matías Quezada.

2019. “Alejandro Lipschütz y el evolucionismo: Darwin en clave marxista y desde el sur del mundo”, en Sarmiento et al, Reflexiones sobre darwinismo desde las Islas Canarias. Madrid: Doce Calles, pp. 469-483.

2018. “Alimentación y eugenesia: aproximaciones desde Chile 190-1950”, en Juan Carlos Yáñez (coord.), Gobernar es alimentar. Discursos, legislación y políticas de alimentación popular. Chile, 1900-1950, Editorial América en Movimiento, Valparaíso, pp. 53-82

2018. “La curiosa historia de un libro. El camino propio evolutivo y el origen del hombre de Max Westenhöfer (Chile, 1951)” en Miranda, Marisa et al eds., Darwin y el Darwinismo desde el sur del sur, Madrid: Doce Calles, pp. 365-380.

2018. (con Nicolüas Cárcamo). “Hans Betzhold y el ‘superhombre’ chileno. Historia de una decepción (1938- 1943)”. História Ciências Saúde-Manguinhos, 25 (suppl 1), 51-68.  https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-59702018000300004

2018. “Sexo, eugenesia y política: Waldemar Coutts (Chile, 1895-1959)”. Revista de Historia Universidad de Concepción. N° 25, vol. 1: 109-130. Disponible en https://rudec.cl/index.php/historia/article/view/508/1008.

2018. “La higiene racial explicada a los chilenos: las conferencias de Otto Aichel (1927) y Erwin Baur (1930) en Santiago de Chile”. Revista de Historia Social y de las Mentalidades, Santiago de Chile, Volumen 22, Nº ,: 225-246. Disponible en http://www.revistas.usach.cl/ojs/index.php/historiasocial/article/view/3649/26002945.

2017. “Salvador Allende y el proyecto de esterilización de alienados de 1939 en el contexto de un debate eugénico chileno”. Revista Izquierdas N° 35, pp. 260-286. Disponible en http://www.izquierdas.cl/images/pdf/2017/n35/art10.pdf.

2017. “Sigmund Freud and Alejandro Lipschütz: Psychoanalysis and biology, between Europe and Chile”, Vetö, S. & Sánchez, M., History of the Human Sciences, 30 (1): 7-31. Disponible en http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0952695116684734.

 

Research project as CALAS fellow

Title: Resignifying life today. Criticism of the new eugenics in Latin America

Summary: Despite the symbolic closure determined by the end of World War II, eugenics remains an active and prolific project both in the political agencies located and in symbolic spaces of Our America. Although eugenic thinking and practices seem to be activated around urgent conflicts and pressing bioethical tensions, Current forms of eugenics present remarkable continuities and of course, also ruptures about the eugenic thinking and practices of the first half of the 20th century.

Also today, 2023, after the most acute experience of the Covid-19 pandemic and even on the eve of its outcome and possible end, eugenic issues related to health care were reactivated crudely under a focused hospital approach model ready to triage patients and with a telematic work model that only middle and upper sectors of the population of Latin America could access, Structurally condemned to precarious work and in conditions of housing, nutrition and quality of life that even surprised certain national elites for their precariousness and poverty. The research and intellectual production that we propose is relevant to the already centenary eugenic project that since the International Congress of London in 1911, the New York International Congress of 1922, and the various Pan-American meetings of Eugenics and Homiculture (Havana 1937, Buenos Aires 1932, Bogota 1938) had a transregional presence and a cognitive and operational weight in the public health of the 20th century in Latin America, which was not infrequently focused on the "defense and improvement of race"; that is, on eugenics. But, as we know, eugenics went beyond reproductive and strictly health issues to encompass phenomena such as migration, physical education, marriage, food, and treatment of indigenous peoples.

This vast historical experience of the first half of the twentieth century seems to be reactivated in its arguments, in their logics and practices whenever political scenarios are submerged in fear of the other and conservative policies anchored in ontological conceptions of identity. This project hopes to provide a genealogical and historical approach understandable and ready to use to discuss current problems such as the migration crisis, health, and post-pandemic, the role of women in today’s Latin American society, forms of so-called liberal eugenics and eugenic imaginaries willing to use neoliberal and "pro-life" arguments This is an interdisciplinary research open to philosophical, political, historical, sociological and literary inputs, among others, that in its development it hopes to provide elements for the development of current eugenic arguments in the context of the current crises in Latin America. By the way, the project and its results, hope to constitute situated knowledge, thought and written in and from the South and the dialogue with the eugenic perspectives Eurocentric or Anglo-Saxon North, that seem to lead both the advancement of thoughts and practices and their subsequent study. We affirm that there is one’s knowledge and capacity to contribute both from a comparative perspective and one’s original perspective to the debate on the consequences and effects of eugenic thoughts across the globe.