Precursors of school children anthropometry in Buenos Aires (Argentina, 1880-1930)

AGÜERO, LUIS ABEL; BORTZ, JAIME ELÍAS; BORTZ, GABRIELA

Mérida

Congreso; VII Meeting of the International Society for the History of Medicine; 2013

International Society for the History of Medicine

Anthropometric studies of a population have been considered a useful resource to investigate the sanitary conditions of the community and have been specially applied in children healthcare. These studies have derived into sets of tables built upon significant samples of children population, which allowed conducting statistical analysis to differentiate the variations that are mathematically considered physiological from those that warn of the presence of pathologies, such as malnutrition, growth retardation or others. Historically, one of the most fertile fields in which children anthropometry has been developed was school anthropometry. The first study devoted to the observation and measurement of school children in Buenos Aires dates from 1880. In subsequent years, during the period 1880-1930, increasingly complex anthropometric studies were developed by the physicians Luis R. Cassinelli, Genaro Sisto, Juan P.Garrahan, Saúl I. Bettinotti and Cornejo Sosa. Several tens of thousands of Argentinean children were studied in terms of height, weight, head circumference, chest circumference and mental age. Based on primary source documents, this paper is aimed to study the efforts of these pioneers to establish normality/abnormality criteria on the basis of anthropometric statistics.