04 Pohl-Valero PDF

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Pohl-Valero, S. La raza entra por la boca: Energy, Diet, and Eugenics in Colombia, 1890-1940,
Hispanic American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (2014): 455-486.

La raza entra por la boca: Energy, Diet, and Eugenics in Colombia, 18901940*

Stefan Pohl-Valero
Universidad del Rosario
stefan.pohl@urosario.edu.co

While performing work, a person is truly an engine; this is because, in effect, it transforms the
heat energy contained in food into work. We all recognize the analogy between a person
regarded as an engine and a heat engine.
Alberto Borda Tanco, El motor humano (1914)

The vital reserves of our raceits development, its biotypological characteristics, the index of its
advancement and average life spanrest only on the foundation of good diet.
Jorge Bejarano, Alimentacin y nutricin en Colombia (1941)

Introduction
If German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in the late eighteenth century, systematized the idea that
humans could be divided and ranked according to their capacity for illustration, leadership, and
emancipation along a chromatic scale at whose apex was the white race and below were the
yellow, black, and red races, respectively,
1
a century later, Mexican intellectual and politician
Francisco Bulnes would propose a different classification: the race of wheat, the race of rice, and
the race of corn. Reproducing Kants racist hierarchy, Bulnes did not hesitate to assert, based on
a nutritional analysis of these foods, that the people of corn were incapable of democracy,
given that corn was the eternal peacemaker of the indigenous races of the Americas, and the
foundation of their revulsion toward becoming civilized. Meanwhile, it was the people of
wheat (Europeans) who had reached the highest degree of physical and mental development.
2

With a similar, if ambiguous, language of race and nutritional conditions, Colombias intellectual
elite, during the late nineteenth century and into the first four decades of the twentieth, sought to
restore the strength of an impoverishedindigenous and mestizopopulation that was
consistently thought to be weak and racially inferior but capable of physiological and hereditary
improvement. Such a regeneration, which would allow the achievement of national progress, was
framed under a conceptual horizon that understood the human and social body in terms of a heat
engine that transformed energy.
3

This project of social engineering began to take shape in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, when Colombian doctors, engineers, and lawyers were building a nascent field of
knowledge about work that appropriated and articulated notions of thermodynamics, medical
physics, political economy, and laboratory physiology. At the heart of this research we find the
pursuit of an ideal that sought to optimize workers productivity from an energy-centric point of
view; in it, diet began to be understood primarily as the energy sourcemeasured using the
thermodynamic unit of caloriesneeded for the human machine to work efficiently.
4
The main
2

objective of this article is to demonstrate how, between 1890 and 1940, this conceptualization of
the productive body in terms of energyand the definition of a balanced diet for the bodys
optimization and healthplayed a role in the way that the notion of race acquired new meanings
in the social thought of Colombian elites and in the strategies put in place to achieve what these
elites called the regeneration of the working classes. I further emphasize how discourses and
campaigns aimed at what I will call social thermodynamics were understood by their own
champions as one of the key elements in the heterogeneous local eugenics movement, since the
physiological regeneration of bodies that elites sought to achieve was conceived of as a heritable
characteristic that could thus improve future generations of workers. By using a single
framework of historical analysis to articulate the human engine metaphor, nutrition, and notions
of race, as synthesized in this articles two epigraphs, this case study proposes a research
approach that has been little explored by scholars interested in how people in the first half of the
twentieth century thought about and attempted to intervene in the social milieu. At the same
time, I wish to emphasize that the distinction between the biological and the cultural, which
historians have used to classify and periodize the racialized discourses of the twentieth century,
in this case becomes much more diffuse.
In the Colombian context, several studies have addressed the medicalization of society, the
notion of race, and eugenics in the early twentieth century. These have paid special attention to a
series of public debates among doctors and educators held at the Municipal Theater of Bogot in
1920 and later published under the title Los problemas de la raza en Colombia (The problems of
race in Colombia).
5
Several of these historical analyses have identified two general positions
among the intellectuals involved. On the one hand, we have what we can call the biologicist
view, based on hereditary and geographic determinism, which held that the improvement of the
Colombian race required, on a fundamental level, the establishment of policies that would
encourage the immigration of white Europeans (in addition to prenuptial laws and sterilization
campaigns). On the other hand, we have what we can call the culturalist view, which held that
the implementation of social reforms and policies, as well as educational and hygiene campaigns,
would solve what the elite understood as the problem of how to enable Colombia to enter onto
the stage of civilized and modern nations.
6
This separation between the biologicists and the
culturalists has been understood within various frameworks: traditional Colombian bipartisan
positions (where one position, that of the biologicists, corresponds to a more Conservative view,
the other, of the culturalists, to a more Liberal outlook),
7
differing theories of heredity (hard
eugenics informed by Mendelianism, and soft eugenics informed by neo-Lamarckianism),
8
and
even Foucauldian theory (one group reflecting a strategy of discipline over the individual, the
other a population-based strategy of control).
9
From a diachronic perspective, it has also been
pointed out that in general terms the biologicist view was the prevailing social outlook among
elites during the Conservative governments of the twentieth centurys first three decades, while
the arrival of the Liberals into power in the 1930s shifted understandings of the population, now
articulated through knowledge that viewed the problem as more social and cultural than
biological.
10

3

The international literature on the history of eugenics has pursued this type of analysis in
greater depth and complexity, highlighting the importance of comparative studies and noting
eugenics multiple transnational connections as well as the diverse appropriations of the science
of good breeding and its role in various projects of social reform, nation building, citizenship,
and gender.
11
This literature has also stressed the importance of more broadly analyzing the
historical development of the life sciences as one of the fundamental sources of eugenicist
ideas.
12
For example, it has been more than a decade since Frank Diktter pointed to the complex
and multiple meanings that eugenics has had in various countries, as well as its profound
influencecrosscut by various racist ideologiesin social thought across the ideological
spectrum. A multitude of intellectuals and doctors around the globe, Diktter notes, embarked on
what they understood as a morally acceptable and scientifically viable way of improving human
heredity
13
in the face of fears and anxieties regarding modernity and the search for social and
economic progress. However, in arguing that a biologized view of society was a structuring
element of the eugenics movement, Diktter still adheres to the historiographical tradition
linking eugenics fundamentally to evolutionary theories (albeit diverse ones) and the metaphor of
society as an organism: Eugenics was not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a
modern way of talking about social problems in biologizing terms: politicians with mutually
incompatible beliefs and scientists with opposed interests could all selectively appropriate
eugenics to portray society as an organic body that had to be guided by biological laws.
14

Clearly, this idea that society was an organism subject to the same laws of evolution as
living organisms was a key element in the so-called medicalization of society.
15
For
Colombiaas for other countries in Latin Americathis conception of evolution appeared to be
more neo-Lamarckian than Darwinian or Mendelian, which helped give the local eugenics
movement its particular characteristics.
16
Since the appearance of Diktters article, the history of
eugenics has significantly expanded its perspectives and fields of analysis,
17
but it is still very
rare to find among such research work that takes the notions about biology current at the time
and consequently the notion of the biologization of politics and societyand incorporates
aspects such as the analogy of the body-machine and the physiology of nutrition.
Here I propose that paying attention precisely to the cultural construction of a
physiological field of knowledge about work and diet, articulated through the analogy of the
human body as a machine that transforms energy, enriches the historical analysis of eugenics in
several respects. This approach allows us to disentangle some of the multiple meanings that were
built around the biological and to therefore get closer to the meanings that were historically
attached to what we usually call a biologized view of social problems. In turn, this allows us to
historicize both the biological and the social, which implies rethinking the distinction between a
biologicist view and a culturalist view.
18
Some historiographies, both local and international,
have used such an approach to periodize the development of racialized social thought in the
twentieth century. Here, instead of assuming that reality lends itself to a sharp division into
cultural and natural aspects and that the knowledge produced to account for these aspects is
easily separable, I propose an approach that understands scientific knowledge and social order as
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produced in conjunction (a coproductionist view).
19
I further propose that the scientific research
of nature and society is performative, since it helps configure the biological and social realities it
attempts to study.
20

As noted by historians of the life sciences such as Donna Haraway and Nelly Oudshoorn,
problematizing the modern division between culture and nature allows us first to understand this
ontological separation as a particular cultural construction that has served precisely to impose
different forms of knowledge (separate scientific disciplines) to address these seemingly
irreconcilable realms (e.g., the difference created by social science itself between [natural] sex
and [cultural] gender). Second, it allows us to address scientific theories of the natural not simply
as transparent reflections of what is out there (body, sex, genes, and hormones, for instance) but
as a series of discourses and practices mediated by, among other things, cultural stereotypes
about men and women as well as more generally by asymmetrical power relations.
21
Scholars of
race such as Peter Wade propose that this theoretical pathway may provide explanatory power in
the context of an Anglo-Saxon historiography that has traditionally produced a very rigid
historical notion of race that moves from a biological sort of racism in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to a cultural one from the mid-twentieth century onward. As Wade mentions,
this periodization of racism involve[s] the naturalisation of culture and the culturalisation of
nature: this dual dynamic makes it unclear what is being talked of as natural and what cultural in
a given context and thus provides the possibility of seeing the natural as cultural and the cultural
as natural. . . . Enquiry into what nature (and blood, genes and biology) mean in a given context
helps us to see the flexible ways racial discourses work.
22

Thus, in this article I approach the body-machine analogy as a cultural artifact, rooted in a
particular historical context, that helped to denaturalize the populations power to do work and at
the same time to naturalize the ideal of an industrialized society governed by an ethic of energy-
centric productivism.
23
This social thermodynamics allowed a series of knowledges, practices,
and institutions to be assembled that together helped shape a specific reality of human nature
and, therefore, particular strategies for governing the population. In this process, diet became a
field of research and a social intervention articulated in the languagesimultaneously natural
and culturalof the energy-centric physiology of nutrition and through a particular conception
of heredity that, within the field of childcare (or, as I will discuss below, what experts called
puericulture), suggested that the human machines optimization for work was a heritable
condition.

Nutrition, Energy, and Race
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, we begin to note Colombian doctors growing
interest in the dietary habits and nutritional characteristics of populations in different regions of
the country. These doctors encouraged the state to regulate diets and working conditions in
accordance with the modern science of nutrition. In 1911, Conservative doctor and hygienist
Pablo Garca Medina, who would play a key role in consolidating and centralizing public health
in Colombia,
24
noted that the deficient diet of our working class should lead us to reflect on the
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dire consequences that this has, not only on individual and collective health, but on the future of
the race; if modern hygiene has any important role to play among the popular classes, it is
certainly in its relationship to the social problems that nowadays concern most of the worlds
governments, problems it can contribute to solving in an effective way.
25
Garca Medinas
conception of the human bodys functioning was clearly energy-centric: In man, as in any
organism engaged in activity, energy is constantly being developed, which is manifested in the
movements we perform, in the heat our body produces, in the electricity that is developed in the
tissues, etc., etc. Organs take in the food they need to produce this energy from the exterior.
26

Thus for this hygienist, the future of the race was intimately connected with the working class
obtaining a diet with sufficient calories for the type of work performed, as well as the clothing
and living conditions needed to help the energy balance of such work activities.
27

One of the pioneering works that Garca Medina mentions with respect to these issues was
that of Manuel Cotes, a physician who at the First National Medical Congress in 1893 presented
a study on the diets of laborers from the high plateau of Bogot. At the center of his analysis we
find the goal of increasing the productive power of the country, insofar as it was possible to
actually restore strength annihilated by work through what came to be called the balanced
diet.
28
Cotes, who in the future would be president of the Departmental Board of Hygiene of
Magdalena, conducted a thorough study of more than 200 workers, categorizing them into three
types and indicating the average salary and diet of each. Based on this, he established that their
diet was insufficient to meet the energy expenditure incurred in their work activities, which, he
asserted, could cause the bankruptcy of the living machine.
29
Cotes urged participants at the
First National Medical Congress to recognize the importance of indoctrinating schoolchildren
and workers in the rules of hygiene and nutrition so as to teach them how to become efficient
machinery for the nations advancement. The state was to oversee and regulate laborers wages
in order to ensure that they were sufficient to meet basic needs for food, housing, and shelter.
30

As did Garca Medina and other doctors of the time, Cotes understood that diet played a
central role in improving the race. The concept of race used in these discourses was ambiguous,
sometimes referring to the general Colombian population and sometimes to regional groupsfor
example, to the Antioquian race or to indigenous communities. Cotes himself wondered about
the physical, moral, and intellectual capacities of the Indians of the high plateau of Bogot, or
the Chibcha tribe, noting that the physical and moral strength of a people is developed,
advantageously, in direct and precise proportion to the foods it consumes.
31
For Cotes, the
Chibcha had enjoyed a diet that was, at the time of the conquest and during the colonial period,
substantial and restorative, which was proof of the strength and intelligence of this powerful
and wealthy race. He lamented the mid-nineteenth-century policies of economic liberalism,
particularly the states incredible decision to abolish Indian reservations, for cutting short the
configuration of a mestizo race ideally suited for work under high-altitude atmospheric and
climatic conditions.
32
According to Cotes, the barrier to Indians progress, and the cause of their
racial weakness, could clearly be deduced from a combination of factors that were political
(economic liberalism, specifically the disappearance of reservations), social (poor education and
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low wages), and physiological (wear on the human machine due to poor diet) in nature. As he
went on to speculate, if those [Republican] governments had heeded the instruction of those
people and taken positive steps to ensure that wages were sufficient to offset the cost of the work
provided, those peoplefree, intelligent, and industrioussurrounded by the endearing
affections of home, would have been the solid foundation of a new race formed by crossing and
selection, in the best physical condition to overcome the atmospheric and climate action of these
altitudes better than any other immigrant race.
33

With respect to workers from other regions, the classification of their labor and moral
capacities also depended on their diet and the amount of energy they ingested from it. Pointing to
statistics on meat consumption in different regions of the country, Cotes highlighted the
physiological absurdity that consumption decreased with increasing altitude. This was one
reason why workers on the coast and in Antioquia [had] greater strength to work than those of
Boyac and the high plateau of Bogot, since the diet of the former [was] superior to that of the
latter, which therefore [made] them more robust and more intelligent.
34
Garca Medina wielded
the same argument in a study of the laborers from the plains of Casanare. Although this
physician declared that the locals diet was limited and monotonous (mainly rice, cassava,
bananas, and large quantities of meat and coffee), it was sufficiently nutritious; this resulted in a
smart, talkative, and brave population that enjoyed great muscular strength and resistance to
fatigue. In contrast, mountain dwellers were weak, anemic, and lazy because they ate much
less meat than those from the plains.
35
No wonder Carlos Michelsen, a doctor who authored one
of the first works on dietary hygiene in the city of Bogot, did not hesitate to say that, based on
nutritional and statistical studies, the size, power, strength, and morality of well-managed
nations develop in direct proportion to the consumption of meat.
36

Meanwhile, in 1913 Miguel Triana, an engineer, naturalist, and traveler, made note of the
keys to achieving social progress and the regeneration of the Colombian population from a
perspective that was equally energy-centric but diametrically opposed to the above regional and
racial classifications. This engineer stressed that the Andean highlands, despite being an area
where locomotion is tiresome, where the heart invests a greater amount of effort to circulate
blood in the various regions of the human body, and where the frigid temperatures require an
increased amount of work from farmworkers for agricultural production, was precisely the best
place to take advantage of the multitude of forces that the mountain conceals.
37
The climatic
and physiological conditions there, claimed Triana, had shaped the highlanders extensive
capacity for work as well as a character that was brave, thrifty, persevering, and astute, unlike
the children of the plains, who were weaker in every way than the former.
38
This sociology
of the mountain, as he labeled it, pointed the way for compatriots of Indian blood all over
Colombia to leave behind the classification of inferior races, if they learned how to leverage
and optimize their energy resources.
39
In its fullest extent, the sociology proposed by Triana
reflected the energy-centric paradigm in which it was inscribed, as it asserted that the degree of
civilization and culture could be measured in mechanical units of thermodynamics. The psychic
life and social progress represented, in the final analysis, pure consumption of heat.
40
As the
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civil engineer Alberto Borda Tanco explained in 1914, while performing work, a person is truly
an engine, and the maximum useful work that a laborer could produce was measurable
precisely with the thermodynamic unit of energy. He suggested (in the passage that provides one
of this essays epigraphs) that the factors that determined the daily amount of work produced by
the human motor were analogous to those affecting the thermal machine: race, or the brand
of the motor; health and amount of food and air, or the good condition [of the motor],
and so on.
41

The words of these hygienists and engineers betray the complex and interconnected
physiological, racial, social, and moral aspects with which elites sought to produce a population
ideally suited, in terms of energy, for the nations progress and modernization, as they
understood this ideal. These discourses on, and incipient investigation of, social thermodynamics
were framed in the context of a Conservative policy of institutional regeneration, centralist and
interventionist in nature. This policy was directed first against the alleged political instability
caused by the federalist Liberal governments of the mid-nineteenth century; then, after the
Thousand Days War and the loss of Panama, it was channeled by a more pragmatic spirit into
the pursuit of economic development for national progress.
42
The idea of forging a new race, as
Cotes commented, captured an important aspect of the Regenerations project of social and
moral reform.
43
This project, in its physiological and energy-centric facets, not only sought to
produce an efficient working class but also helped to generate, albeit in a contradictory fashion,
hierarchical and reductionist ethnic and regional classifications.
In the first decades of the twentieth century there was thus a growing push on the part of
the medical profession for state intervention into social issues such as the regulation of wages
and food prices, occupational hygiene conditions, and education on hygiene and diet. All these
were issues thought about and proposed, at least in part, based on the ideal of achieving
maximum performance of the human machine and avoiding its alleged racial degeneration.
Although the advent of the Liberal governments in the 1930s generally shifted discourses and
policy initiatives on the labor and health of workers from a paternalism informed by the Catholic
ideal of charity to a more populist position that attempted to integrate and co-opt the labor
movement, this focus on energy and racial dimensions in the push to increase the countrys
productive power continued to structure how intellectuals framed and intervened in some of the
workers social problems.
44

Indeed, if in 1920 Colombian agriculturalists read with interest that thermodynamics and
nutrition were bringing new solutions to the so-called problem between capital and labor, insofar
as these topics allowed them to calculate the fuel needed for the work of the human machine
and thus to scientifically define workers daily wages,
45
years later, in 1935, the same agricultural
journal would publish an equally energy-centric conceptualization of food and the body that
reflected throughout the interconnected natural and cultural aspects that formed the conceptual
horizon for defining and resolving the social question:

8

When public opinion is preoccupied with questions about the debilitation of race, the decline in
birthrates, improving the lot of workers, wages, pensions, manual workers, laws concerning care
for the elderly, the sick, and the incurable, and when the socialists say that the social question is a
matter of the stomach, one must educate about what the best output that can be obtained from the
human machine. Mechanics, electricians, and agronomists know all about handling machines, but
they do not know about nutritional needs.
46

Laurentino Muoz, a Liberal doctor and director of the National Department of Hygiene
between 1936 and 1938, argued also, in 1939, that the biological tragedy of the Colombian
people was based largely both on poor nutrition that failed to invigorate the race and on a
government that had not known how to properly make use of human energies for noble and
redemptive purposes.
47
Thus, most Colombians were in a state of physiological misery, with
biological strength that merely sufficed for vegetative functions and insufficient to produce
and create wealth.
48
The framework of energy-centric productivism within which this discourse
was inscribed is reflected in a discussion of the workday. Muoz defended his call to reduce
workers daily schedules to eight hours on the assumption that this would prevent physiological
fatiguethat is, the wearing down of the living machine.
49
With this, workers performance
would improve:

In response to the establishment of the eight-hour day in our Country, the observation was made
that both the private and state economies would be greatly harmed because the Colombian worker
does not yield the same output as those in other countries where hygiene defends the human mass
and alcohol does not destroy men . . . but due to that same bodily situation, the Colombian worker
necessitates that the task not lead to fatigue, with this word being understood in a physiological
sense; with an 8-hour workday the Colombian workermost of whom are sickwill at least enjoy
some rest, and during his waking hours, despite his condition, he will outperform what he could do
in 10 or 12 hours of continuous work.
50

This energy-centric and racial perception of the social question also emerged in the work
carried out by the Ministry of Labor, Hygiene, and Social Welfare, created in 1938. One of the
first booklets the ministry published as part of its educational campaign reported on a study on
the diet of the working class in Bogot; it addressed, among other aspects, family types, income
levels, food eaten, and market prices, as well as the chemical composition of the consumed
foods nutrients and its vitamin and caloric content. The dietary insufficiency of the workers
who could not compensate for the energy cost of their work activitieswas cited as the main
cause of the population's degenerative process.
51
This type of study, the ministry claimed,
should be widely disseminated to make the public understand the foundations of the biological
policy that the government was trying to develop and to form a clear health awareness among
all social classes in the country.
52

It is thus possible to generally argue that the conceptual horizon that helped to structure
elite social thought between 1890 and 1940 had a common element based on the ideal of
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generating more productive working subjects within the framework of a capitalist economy. This
social engineering geared toward the racial invigoration and physiological regeneration of the
populationand which shifted between biological policies and social policieswas discursively
configured during the Conservative period of the Regeneration and had a clear resonance in
political institutions and initiatives during the Liberal Republic.
53
But before we explore the
actions unleashed by this social thermodynamics, it is important to highlight that the same
energy-centric conception of the human body, as well as the idea that the optimized organism
could inherit this condition (as discussed below), can be understood as a language constructed
within a particular cultural context and not merely the biological component of social thought.
Put another way, it is not that there were clearly differentiated and bounded sets of knowledge
about the natural and cultural components of reality, which people attempted to grasp and
manage, but rather that reality took on a particular form when a series of knowledges, practices,
and institutions were assembled. In our case, that assembly focused on the cultural artifact of the
body-machine.

Body-Machine and Social Thermodynamics
One of the disciples of Conservative hygienist Garca Medina was Calixto Torres Umaa, a
pediatrician who in his 1913 medical school thesis conducted a detailed investigation into the
metabolic capabilities of the residents of Bogot and Tunja. Torres reviewed the historical
development of nutrition, stressing that this field of science had reached its maximum
development when it managed to effectively integrate the first law of thermodynamics into its
conception of metabolism: The principle of the conservation of energy is thus applied to the
animal just as accurately as to the steam engine.
54

This analogy, which was beginning to structure the way in which peoples diet and work
capacity were studied and manipulated, should not be considered a transparent reflection or
explanation of human nature embodied in the biological discourse of nutrition. As Donna
Haraway has clearly pointed out, it was in the European industrial context of the second half of
the nineteenth century that scientists materially constituted the organism as a laboring system,
structured by a hierarchical division of labor, and an energetic system fueled by sugars and
obeying the laws of thermodynamics.
55
The now classic work of Anson Rabinbach on the
modern ties between the economy, health, and productivity offers a detailed study of the process
by which, during the moment addressed by Haraway, human nature was constructed around the
modern conception of the body as a thermodynamic engine.
56
As I have discussed elsewhere, in
Colombia at this same time, this analogy underwent a complex process of appropriation, in
which cultural, religious, economic, and epistemological elements played a role in how social
thought among both Conservative and Liberal elites integrated an interpretation of the body that,
while materialistic and at first considered a source of social disorder, allowed these elites to
quantify the work potential of the population while reducing their real existence, physical and
intellectual, to a mere condition of transforming and optimizing energy.
57
If the mid-nineteenth
century saw an emphasis on the grievous error of some writers who have equated man with a
10

machine,
58
in the early twentieth century the idea that every worker was a machine that
undergoes deterioration and needs to repair itself continuously, and that the force this
wonderful human machine uses to act is energy, had become a structuring element in how to
address social reality.
59

Torres Umaas study was a true reflection of how this energy-centric conception of the
organism-machine, inextricably related to the representation of an industrial and productive
society, in turn helped to define some of the social problems that were perceived as most
pressing for the Colombian nation.
60
In fact, this physicians research was presented at the
Second Pan American Scientific Congress, held in Washington, DC, in 19161917, as an
example of the highlights from the most relevant national research.
61
On the initiative of the US
delegation, the Colombian government was asked to choose local speakers for this conference.
Dr. Carlos Esguerra, president of the National Academy of Medicine, proposed to make this
choice based on whether the projects are of national interest and reflect the sciences that our
academies cultivate.
62
The fact that a study framed within the energy-centric physiology of
nutrition was chosen demonstrates the perception that this field of knowledge was key to
confrontingwhile simultaneously defining, as Torres himself notedthe nations most
significant problems.
63

His work was based on physiological and chemical measurements taken in Bogot and
Tunja, which, when statistically compared with European averages, would acquire social
significance with respect to the Colombian populations capacity for progress as well as the
racial superiority or inferiority of different regional and national physiologies. This
quantification of difference was based on average measurements of body temperature, capacity
of the thoracic cavity, red blood cell counts, and the chemical composition of urine, which Torres
obtained from population samples categorized as working class and upper class. Torres
compared these results with those obtained in similar studies of European populations, arguing
that our soil is rich enough in nutrient materials and our foodstuffs have nothing to envy in
those of the temperate zones. He concluded that our race . . . is under attack by a principle of
physiological degeneration that renders it incapable of defending itself against the harshness of
high altitudes.
64
Thus although local foods were sufficiently nutritious, the metabolic capacity
of the highland populationincluding the upper classesto assimilate them was lower than that
of European populations, which resulted in a greater predilection toward certain diseases and
reduced work capacity.
It would seem that the local human machine was less efficient in its ability to transform
food energy into physical and intellectual work than ones located elsewhere.
65
Although the
altitude was one of the immediate causes of this decline of human efficiency, Torres indicated
that it was very likely that if the same measurements were taken for inhabitants of other regions,
they would yield similar results. This was because, in addition to its altitude, Colombias
location in the seasonless equatorial tropics, with its specific atmospheric characteristics, could
result in such biological inferiority.
66
One generalization from this energy-centric and
hierarchical view of the races was very well summed up a few years later by a reporter for the
11

cultural magazine Cromos, who assured that it was the capacity of the blonde races (European
and American) to develop energy that led to the subjugation of Colombians abroad and that
caused Colombians to experience reverence, fear, [and] submission.
67

Teacher training programs unmistakably reflected the consolidation of this social
thermodynamics and its emerging role in state policies for the governance of life. In 1917, in
response to demands for more hygiene education for the population, the government designated
the official text for nutrition instruction in Colombias teacher training schools: a treatise written
by Rafael Zerda Bayn, a doctor and chemist, entitled Food Chemistry, Adapted to the Economic
and Hygienic Needs of Colombia. The Ministry of Public Instruction bought 3,000 copies for
distribution at these educational institutions, which served to train future teachers for public
schools throughout Colombia.
68
The goal was to ensure that teachers had sufficient knowledge to
pass on to Colombian children the foundations of a dietary hygiene that would maintain health
and achieve an energy balance between what they consumed and what they expended in labor. In
the text Zerda Bayn defined the science of diet as a thermodynamic analysis seeking to
optimize the bodys productive capacity: Thermo-alimentation is the study of the nature of the
foods needed to contribute a number of calories compatible with good health during work. . . . A
balanced diet. . . . should meet the functional needs of the body and be of good quality, in a
quantity proportional to the work a person performs.
69

In the early years of the twentieth century, several hygiene manuals for schoolchildren and
mothers were also published, paying special attention to childrens diets. As one of these noted
in 1905, having attributed the visible degeneration of our race to the action of the environment
and to the vague and indefinite effects of time, we have not trained our attention on the real
agents of our weakness and decay.
70
Its author, Dr. Jos Ignacio Barberi, together with Torres
Umaa and other doctors, would in 1917 found the Pediatric Society of Bogot as an initiative
attacking precisely those agents of weakness and decay. The purpose of the society was

to develop and perfect, among us, the study of childrens diseases, promote their upbringing and
provide care for their diseases; to that end it will propose the founding of free clinics in various
districts of the city, it will try to establish the institution known as the Gotas de Leche [Drops of
Milk], and it will concern itself with using all possible means to disseminate child-rearing methods
in accordance with modern hygienic ideas; to accomplish this, its members will regularly give talks
for mothers who wish to improve the health of their children. It will thus be a scientific and
educational society as well as a charitable organization.
71

The Drop of Milk program was created in Bogot one year later. Although this institution,
intended to provide milk to poor children whose mothers were unable to adequately meet their
nursing needs, has been generally understood as a social welfare program in the Catholic
tradition of charity,
72
it was also framed within the scientific field of diet and public hygiene. In
fact, the Pediatric Society of Bogot was appointed to lead the scientific aspect of the
institution,
73
defining the milk rations that children should consume in caloric terms according
to age and weight. Several physicians of the day served as interns in these institutions and carried
12

out their medical school theses on chemical and caloric analyses of the diet these children
received, as well as on the statistical reconstruction of exact racial type [of the Colombian child]
at different ages.
74
This institution, a private initiative that enjoyed an increasing amount of
government support, was portrayed in 1919 by liberal hygienist Jorge Bejarano as a space to
shape beautiful examples of race and vigor and to achieve the renovation of the peoples.
75
In
1933, at the beginning of a Liberal period following more than 40 years of Conservative
governments, there were about 30 Drop of Milk centers and nurseries in 17 cities, where they
prepared an average of 150,000 infant bottles per month.
76

Both the Drop of Milk centers and the school cafeterias, the latter established in different
Colombian cities in the 1930s, sought to instill the principles of a scientific diet in mothers and
children and to teach them to think of their bodies as heat engines that should be in optimal
condition for transforming food energy into productive work.
77
School vacation colonies,
launched at the end of that decade, offer another excellent example of these social engineering
laboratories. Rural adolescents from different parts of the country gathered at these colonies for
three-month periods of physiological restoration through a hygiene system that included
physical education and a balanced diet.
78
Both the cafeterias and the colonies were coordinated
by the Ministry of National Education, which in turn began a major campaign of popular cultural
diffusion in 1935 known as the Village Library (Biblioteca Aldeana).
79
The contents of these
libraries, which were intended to reach every municipality in the country, included a series of
technical booklets with practical skills for the rural population. Knowledge about energy in ones
diet and the functioning of the body-machine was a central theme in several of these. As one of
these texts states, Our body is a precious machine that needs special attention. Its various parts
must work in perfect harmony. . . . Like any other machine, the body needs fuel to work. This
fuel, however, must be consistent with the nature of each machine. . . . When the fuel is adequate
and is properly developed in every organ, the machine produces good work. But if the food is
inadequate, or is ill-prepared in any of its various phases, disease ensues.
80

Thus all these institutions and cultural campaigns advocated that the population start to
perceive their own bodies as machines that could be regulated to improve productivity. This
capacity for self-regulation led, in turn, to an understanding of these institutional spaces, as well
as the body itself and even the kitchens of Colombian households, as social laboratories for
physiological regeneration and the optimization of the human machine. Another of the Village
Library booklets expressed it eloquently: If the laboratory of your body cannot take, from the
substance that an individual ingests as food, what it needs for all the mentioned purposes of
alimentation, then its health and vital resistance would be ruined. Likewise, it was hoped
that, thanks to the science of nutrition, the kitchen [would become] a laboratory where the raw
materials, which are raw or unprocessed foods, must be transformed into healthy and digestible
meals, and not into poisons that are all the more harmful the more appealing they are to the
palate.
81

This project of social thermodynamics also appeared in the outreach work of the Ministry
of Labor, Hygiene, and Social Welfare. In 1940, two years after its creation, the ministry
13

published a booklet on Comprehensive Child Hygiene and Diet, which proposed the
improvement of the biological, social, and moral conditions of the new generations through a
balanced diet for the population.
82
As the authors pointed out, the field of nutrition research
should include analysis of production, transportation, consumption, education, the energy and
biological value of foods and their mixtures, [and] setting a living wage, so that a fair correlation
is established between the purchasing power of labor and the cost of biological needs (food,
shelter, clothing, and entertainment).
83
One of the expected results of the ministrys campaigns
was the optimization of what the booklets authors did not hesitate to call the social energy of
the country: If the body does not get sufficient food of appropriate quantity and quality, it will
not . . . be able to develop the energy to work. This latter aspect of the problem is the most
important one, and also the one that presents the greatest difficulties. . . . All governments . . .
should intervene to normalize the multiple factors that affect diet, since it is the source of social
energy and the foundation for the defense of individual and collective health.
84
But if nutrition
was identified as a key element for a social engineering aimed at regulating the body machine in
order to improve national productivity, it was simultaneously related to the eugenic idea of
producing better generations of workers.

Puericulture, Inheritance, and Alcoholism
The preface of the above-mentioned 1940 booklet stressed that the campaigns for child and
maternal protection pursued by the national government were part of the science of
puericulture, a field whose most significant progress had been achieved in the realm of diet.
85

The booklets authors understood puericulture to be a central element in a eugenics designed to
prevent hereditary defects (dysgenic elements) caused largely by poor maternal and child
nutrition.
86
In fact, the science of puericulture, as a branch of pediatrics whose approach did not
separate the biological from the social, had attracted interest from several Colombian doctors
since the early twentieth century. One of its main promoters in France, Adolphe Pinard, had a
great impact in Colombia, which included the translation of his book Puericulture (Parenting
Newborns) in 1907 by a Bogot publisher.
87
This field of science, which Pinards followers in
Colombia defined as one that involves the investigation of all knowledge concerning
reproduction, conservation, and improvement of the human species, was understood as a critical
source for improving the race.
88
Several Colombian physicians emphasized Pinards idea that
birth defects could be prevented before and after procreation through appropriate measures
understood as forms of eugenics, a science that by persevering in its efforts . . . will one day
transform inheritance from a blind force transmitting evils into a force responsible for
surrounding the childs cradle with gifts.
89

One of the fundamental concepts that informed puericulture and that allowed the diet of
parents and children to be conceived of as a eugenics campaign was the neo-Lamarckian idea of
the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
90
As physician Jos Salazar explained in his 1921
thesis, germ cells degenerate by the direct action of certain diseases and the intoxication of the
parents. This degeneration acted on the seeds that have not yet been combined, through their
14

carriers, creating, at their origin, what have been called hereditary defects. For example,
parental alcoholism, even a short time before the baby was born, could generate alterations in the
protoplasm of the germ cells, producing pathological generations that continue to threaten
several successive generations in the form of hereditary vices or defects.
91
As Nancy Stepan has
noted for Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, strong cultural links between Latin America and France
(especially in medical education), as well as certain Catholic values from these countries
(condemning practices such as sterilization), were important factors in the way in which a soft
eugenics was appropriated and articulated, informed by neo-Lamarckian notions of inheritance
and an emphasis on public health campaigns.
92

Torres Umaa himself, a follower of neo-Lamarckian assumptions and a promoter of
puericulture, related eugenics with nutrition and did not hesitate to say that other than
generation and inheritance, in biology there is no problem as momentous as nutrition.
93
In the
midst of this growing interest in the scientific study of nutrition as a way to improve and secure
the future of the race, it is not surprising that the same Torrres Umaa was among those invited
to the 1920 discussion of the problems of race in Colombia before an audience crowded into
the Municipal Theater of Bogot.

Torress presentation was, in fact, a summary of the results of
his aforementioned metabolic research from 1913, and in it he once again assured that it was an
experimentally proven fact that there exists in us [the inhabitants of the Cundinamarca and
Boyac highlands] the signs of biological weakness. But at the same time, science and hygiene
could replace what nature has not managed to achieve in its process of adaptation.
94
Citing the
workers of Puerto Rico as an example, he highlighted how modern hygiene had managed to
transform them into robust men whose favorable change is increasingly accentuated in their
offspring, because if they inherit acquired characteristics in the unfavorable sense, all the more
reason [would they inherit] those that are the result of a restoration by virtue of the biological
force that tends to lead individuals in the direction of their ancestral types.
95
According to what
we have seen in the previous section, it is evident that for Torres Umaa, the inheritance of
acquired robustness implied the idea of the body-machines energy optimization.
As Catalina Muoz indicates, the race debate rehearsed at the Municipal Theater was not
new and had already drawn the interest of mid-nineteenth-century elites in their quest for
national economic progress. But now, says Muoz, within the new economic and social context
of the early twentieth century, similar concerns were again being formulated with respect to the
populations capacity to move forward in the countrys modernization. Amid nascent
industrialization, the building of commercial and technological infrastructure, and forays into
international markets, as well as the emergence of social tensions led by various actors (the
working class, women, students), elites faced the challenge of making sense of a changing
social reality with the support of geographical and medical theories that afforded them tools
they used creatively to understand and order their reality.
96
The important thing to note here is
that the field of knowledge on diet and work, framed within the representation of the human
body as a heat enginea symbol, in turn, of the ideal of the modernization into which Colombia
hoped to ventureconstituted one of the key elements in assigning an energy dimension to the
15

notion of race and to the local eugenics movement starting in the early twentieth century. The
body-machine could be regulated through dietthat is, its fuelto achieve both its
physiological regeneration and its productive optimization. This condition could then be
inherited and hence lead the way toward the nations entry into its long-awaited modernity.
Indeed, if in 1911 the above-mentioned Conservative hygienist Garca Medina claimed that
with an adequate diet the Colombian working population could produce future generations that
would not bear the seed of decay as they do today but rather possess the physiological force
necessary to save the race from the degeneration that holds it back,
97
in 1935 one of the
nutrition booklets produced for the Liberal cultural project of the Village Library indicated that
deficiencies caused by nutritional neglect of children during the prenatal and postnatal period
were subsequently irreparable. Hence, the booklet says, it is necessary from this very day
forward to apply todays dietary knowledge to children in order to structure their bodies and
promote their health and vigor, so that the coming generations might surpass ours.
98
In both
discourses, the analogy of the body as a thermodynamic machine was present, and food was
understood precisely as the fuel that could lead to both productive and hereditary improvement.
From this perspective, alcohol consumption and its consequences in terms of labor and
degeneration were widely discussed. As Jos Mara Lombana Barreneche, a physician, argued at
the beginning of the twentieth century, alcoholismand in particular the constant consumption
of chicha, an indigenous beverage extracted from fermented corn very popular among peasants
and workerswas the main source that raised up generations of people who were starving and
physically and morally degenerate, because we must not lose sight of the fact that race enters
through the mouth; a well-fed population is a population that is strong, hardworking,
independent, and proud, a nation of the future thanks to its progress in industry, the arts, and
sciences.
99

Within the framework of a debate that had been ongoing for more than 100 years
concerning the regulatory measures that should be taken against chicha consumption so as to
promote good morality, public order, and the health of the population, the tone of the arguments
had transformed significantly at the beginning of the twentieth century, addressing not only the
consequence of hereditary degeneration but also an energy aspect.
100
Appealing to a kind of
spontaneous, energetic sociology, Garca Medina explained the reasons why workers drank the
famous drink. Moral weakness or bad habits had been set aside in favor of an explanation of
energy balance conditioned by the requirements of labor. Workers abused chicha, he suggested,
to compensate an insufficient diet lacking certain primary elements compared to the effort that
must be employed to perform a job and repair tissue losses. Chichas transient arousal tricks
the body, and for this reason the worker thus becomes accustomed to seeking the energy he
lacks in alcoholic products, leading to alcoholism, not out of pleasure but out of his bodys
need, which could be better satisfied by other means.
101

From the perspective of energy productivism, the solution was not simply to prohibit the
consumption of chicha, which would amount to emptying the tanks of the productive social
machine, but to prepare the drink properly, lower its alcohol content, and combine it with other
16

macronutrients, or at least find a substitute for it. Thus, with the consolidation of a balanced diet,
chichaproperly preparedwas considered by several chemists and physicians not as the drink
that brutalize people but rather as the cheapest fuel they could put into action in the human
machine.
102
For example, Zerda Bayn, in his aforementioned manual on food chemistry,
highlighted the importance of beverages such as coffee and chicha, given that their chemical
characteristics fostered in the body a willingness to work and exercise and developed more
energy, reducing the sense of fatigue. Although alcoholic beverages were presented as dangerous
to people in society (engendering violence, indolence, and slothfulness on the job), Zerda Bayn
presented chicha as the first nutritional drink available to a large number of populations in the
Republic. Its use was essential as a source of cheap energy for workers bodies, and once it was
produced hygienically, under scientific parameters, he claimed that it would be the most
healthy, enjoyable, and nutritious of known [beverages], perfectly adaptable to the physical
conditions of human organization at these altitudes.
103
Lombana Barreneche, in turn, recognized
that as food, [chicha] has important qualities and is the staple food of our humble workers, who
pair it with nothing more than coarse bread and a bowl of porridge, to transform it into the
energy they use to cultivate our fields or to perform work of another order.
104

Although in the 1930s the campaign against chicha intensified and beer began to displace it
as the new popular drinkin 1948, after the riots over the death of Liberal politician and social
reformer Jorge Elicer Gaitn, a national law was enacted that banned chichas consumption
statistics as late as 1939 showed that workers in Bogot consumed an average of 2,250 grams of
chicha per day. For Francisco Socarrs, a Liberal physician, it was precisely thanks to chicha
and to the fact that it was included in food consumption statisticsthat Bogots workers
achieved a caloric intake similar to that of workers in other countries. In fact, the popular drink,
according to Socarrss study, contributed 50% of the caloric regime,
105
and without it the
working class would be unable to survive. His analysis of the issue was very similar to that of
Garca Medina: chicha consumption derived from a physiological requirement of energy balance,
and it was the most important nutritional resource [by providing the cheapest calories] that was
left available for workers following rising market prices.
106
Socarrs, recalling the debate two
decades earlier over the problems of race in Colombia, upheld the idea that the Colombian
population was subject to a racial decline mainly caused by a poverty in diet,
107
but he
nevertheless defended chicha consumption precisely because of its ability to provide the energy
necessary for the working classes.

Conclusions
Throughout the period under review, there seemed to exist a consensus on the part of the
Colombian scientific elite, both Conservative and Liberal, that a balanced diet was one of the
keys for the nations entry into modernity, as it would help to produce the sought-after healthy
and productive population. The ideal of increasing the performance of the body-machine and
achieving its physiological regeneration, as well as the idea that this social engineering would
manage, over the long term, to produce better generations of workers, helped shape the social
17

problem of nutrition and structure both a field of research interested in the populations working
and nutritional conditions and hygiene and education campaigns on nutrition. It also helped
shape institutions such as the Drop of Milk, the school cafeterias, and the vacation colonies; it
even played a role in the scientific manner in which minimum wages and working hours were
set for workers.
Importantly, in this process of constructing the social, the biological notion of the body
was structured not only around the days current theories of evolution and inheritance but also,
and most importantly, on the analogy of the human body as a machine that transformed energy.
But this biologized view of society that here we have called social thermodynamics, with its
language of calories, the vitality of the people, work output, social energy, and physiological
regeneration, was a cultural construct, not simply a transparent reflection of human nature or the
biological component of social discourse. It was within the framework of a nascent
industrialization and the search for Colombias insertion into the productive logic of the modern
capitalist world, as well as within a culture of statistical and comparative quantification, that this
materialistic and energy-centric view of the body was inscribed and appropriateda view that
reduced existence to that which could be measured as a commodity, an energy and matter
accounting system with fuel as the input and work as the output. This social thermodynamics
was connected to the local eugenics movement to the extent that the doctors and health
professionals involved were predisposed, also due to cultural elements, toward a neo-Lamarckian
view of inheritance. This view of inheritance had a great impact in Colombia through the
nutritional field of puericulture. Thus, the constitution of a more productive workforce, thanks to
the rational use of fuel for the human machine, was understood as an acquired characteristic that
could be inherited.
From this perspective, the heterogeneity of social thought throughout this period points not
only to the fact that some adopted a biological view and others a political one when it came time
to address the problems of the population and its alleged racial degeneration, but also more
fundamentally to the fact that in both views, the natural and the cultural were deeply intertwined.
At least with respect to the social problem of nutrition , we are faced with the conjoined presence
of strongly cultural elements such as the populations food traditions and habits, strongly
charitable elements such as food aid to poor children, strongly social elements such as the
education of the population and concern with its working conditions, strongly political elements
such as state regulation of minimum wages for the working classes, and strongly biological
elements such as the metabolic and energy capacities of workers bodies in different regions and
their hereditary conditions. This raises the issue of proposing interpretive frameworks that can
serve as alternatives to the traditional model that separates the natural order from the cultural and
social order. The startling claim of Lombana Barreneche that race enters through the mouth
perhaps can be best explained from a coproductionist view such as the one proposed here. It
signals that the notion of race was moving back and forth, already in the early twentieth century,
between the biological and the cultural, between the inherited, the metabolic, the productive, and
18

the external environment (geographical elements, social conditions and classes, and cultural
practices), and that its meanings were multiple and ambiguous.
108

According to the above, by taking into account specific interventions directed toward the
population it is possible, from a discursive and conceptual point of view, to contextualize the
way in which the problem of nutrition was configured in Colombia, using a periodization that
runs from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1940s, when the context of the Cold War
and developmentalist discourse added new elements to the ways in which this problem was
understood and addressed.
109
Despite the different perceptions that were held, first by the
Conservatives and then by the Liberals, regarding strategies for modernization and for governing
the working classes, it seems likely that the energy productivism noted here was a shared
element structuring these perceptions. The legacy of the Conservative Regeneration in the first
half of the twentieth century, which historian Marco Palacios has called Catholic capitalism,
might encompass this social thermodynamics, albeit with different nuances.
110

Undoubtedly, further research is needed to detail the particulars and modulations of this
social thermodynamics project, its role in shaping notions of race, and its ties to eugenics
throughout this moment. We also need regional and national comparative studies. Aspects such
as the physiological normalcy or pathology of highland dwellers, the hierarchization of races
according to the metabolic capacity of different ethnic groups, or the configuration of a science
of work concerned with fatigue and racial vitality were the focuses of multiple researchers
starting in the late nineteenth century in many Latin American countries, and their positions and
discourses were part of various nation-building projects.
111
In all of them, however, a racialized
view of the working population was deeply connected to a physiological and energy-centric
conception of the human body.

<BIO>Stefan Pohl-Valero is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the Universidad
del Rosario in Bogot. In 2007 he received his PhD in the History of Science from the
Universidad Autnoma de Barcelona. He has been visiting professor at the Center of the History
of Science at the Universidad Autnoma de Barcelona and at the Universidad Nacional de Tres
de Febrero in Buenos Aires. Since 2012 he has been editor of the Social Studies of Health
section of the academic journal Ciencias de la Salud. His book Energa y cultura: Historia de la
termodinmica en la Espaa de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX was published in 2011. He is
currently working on a comparative history of physiology in Latin America and on a cultural
history of nutrition in Colombia.

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<NOTES>
*. The results of the research conducted for this article are part of the project Engineering the
Social: The Relationship between the Natural and Social Sciences in the Construction of the
Modern Body in Colombia, 18701940, funded by the University of Rosario Research Fund
(Fondo de Investigacin de la Universidad del Rosario, FIUR DVG-101). Different versions of
this article were presented at the faculty symposium of the University of Rosario School of
Human Sciences, the Center for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona, the University of Valencias Lpez Piero Institute for the History of Medicine and
Science, the 54th International Congress of Americanists (Vienna, 2012), and the Latin
24

American Studies Association's 30th International Congress (San Francisco, 2012). I wish to
give special thanks to Max S. Hering, Julio Arias, Mnica Garca, Emilio Quevedo, Franz
Hensel, scar Saldarriaga, Rachel Laudan, Hayley Froysland, Carlos Cardona, Adriana Alzate,
Gustavo Vallejo, Thomas Fischer, and the HAHR editors and anonymous readers for their
thoughtful critiques and suggestions.
1. In this regard, see Castro-Gmez, La hybris, 4041.
2. Bulnes, El porvenir, 19, 11. For details on Bulnes, see Pilcher, Que vivan los tamales!, 77
97.
3. On the influence in Europe of an image of nature articulated through the laws of
thermodynamics in the modern conception of the body, society, culture, and the economy, see
Clarke, Energy Forms; Mirowski, More Heat than Light; Pohl-Valero, Energa y cultura;
Rabinbach, Human Motor. In the Latin American context, these types of studies are still in their
very early stages. See, for example, Roldn, Discursos alrededor.
4. In this regard, see Pohl-Valero, Energa, productividad y alimentacin.
5. Jimnez Lpez et al., Los problemas.
6. For a historiographical analysis of the 1920 debate, see Muoz, Estudio introductorio;
Noguera, Medicina y poltica, 1931.
7. Muoz, To Colombianize Colombia.
8. McGraw, Purificar la nacin; Runge Pea and Muoz Gaviria, El evolucionismo social.
9. Senz Obregn, Saldarriaga, and Ospina, Mirar la infancia, 90; Castro-Gmez, Razas que
decaen, 1089.
10. In addition to the references in the previous note, see Pedraza Gmez, El debate
eugensico; Daz, Raza, pueblo y pobres; Muoz, To Colombianize Colombia.
11. For a recent survey, see Bashford and Levine, Oxford Handbook. For the case of Latin
America, the pioneering works are Stepan, Hour of Eugenics; Borges, Puffy, Ugly, Slothful,
and Inert. For Colombia, see, among others, Villegas Vlez, Nacin, intelectuales de elite;
McGraw, Purificar la nacin.
12. Levine and Bashford, Introduction, 4.
13. Diktter, Race Culture, 467.
14. Ibid., 46768.
15. Noguera, Medicina y poltica, 1089.
16. Stepan, Hour of Eugenics; Noguera, Medicina y poltica; McGraw, Purificar la nacin.
However, the presence of a negative eugenics in Argentina has been highlighted by Reggiani,
Depopulation, Fascism, and Eugenics.
17. Recent examples include Miranda and Vallejo, Darwinismo social; Bashford and Levine,
Oxford Handbook.
18. On diet and the history of the social, see Vernon, Ethics of Hunger.
19. On the ontological distinction between nature and culture as a construction specific to
modern Western thought, see Latour, Nunca fuimos modernos.
20. Jasanoff, Ordering Knowledge; Pohl-Valero, Perspectivas culturales.
25

21. Haraway, Simians; Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body.
22. Wade, Race, 15.
23. Pohl-Valero, in Perspectivas culturales, develops the concept of cultural artifact as a
methodological pathway of analysis for the history of science. For a historical overview of the
concept of the body-machine as a cultural artifact, see Morus, Introduction.
24. See Quevedo et al., Caf y gusanos, 167.
25. Garca Medina, La alimentacin, 161. This article was originally published in 1911 in
Revista Mdica de Bogot: rgano de la Academia Nacional de Medicina 29, nos. 345346: pp.
10719.
26. Garca Medina, La alimentacin, 17172.
27. Ibid., 172, 174.
28. Cotes, Rgimen alimenticio, 4142.
29. Ibid., 6.
30. Ibid., 4748.
31. Ibid., 24.
32. Ibid., 2526.
33. Ibid., 25.
34. Ibid., 39.
35. Pablo Garca Medina, quoted in ibid., 4546.
36. Michelsen, Carne, 55.
37. Miguel Triana, Sociologa de la montaa, El Grfico (Bogot), 1 Mar. 1913. (This
publication is unpaginated.)
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Borda Tanco, El motor humano, 21112.
42. See Bejarano, El despegue cafetero.
43. On the moral, social, and racial project of the Regeneration policy period, see Froysland,
Regeneracin de la raza.
44. In his institutional and sociopolitical history of public health in Colombia, Mario Hernndez
characterizes the national health system between 1910 and 1929 as one guided by institutions
governed by the Catholic ideal of charity, but with the growing presence of a community of
physicians intent on modernizing health care through government-influenced public and private
hygiene. This process intensified in the context of an incipient consolidation of the working class
during the 1920s, although the government would continue with a policy of limited state
intervention. Hernndez characterizes the 1930s as a period in which both Liberals and
Conservatives agreed to give the state a leading role in managing workers, the unemployed, and
the poor. This period witnessed the initial moments of a transformation from charity to state-
controlled public assistance. With the creation of the Ministry of Health, social security, the
National Welfare Fund, and other institutions in the 1940s, it seemed that a state public health
26

system had been consolidated; however, it was structurally fragmented, dividing its services and
institutions among the poor, workers (further divided into those sectors of workers with enough
clout to pressure the government), and the rich. Hernndez lvarez, La fractura originaria.
45. R. G. C., Modo de obtener, 22728.
46. Alberto Borda Tanco, Ciencia de la alimentacin: Motor humano y motor animado o de
sangre, Revista Nacional de Agricultura 26, no. 367 (1935): 1215, 14.
47. Muoz, La tragedia biolgica, 22.
48. Ibid., 1.
49. On the configuration of the physiological concept of fatigue in the late nineteenth century,
see Rabinbach, Human Motor.
50. Muoz, La tragedia biolgica, 14041.
51. Socarrs, Alimentacin de la clase obrera, 37.
52. Ibid., 3.
53. The history and sociology of work in Colombia during the first half of the twentieth century
has not paid sufficient attention to the racial dimension in its analysis. An innovative study on
this topic for the case of Peru is Drinot, Allure of Labor.
54. Torres Umaa, Sobre metabolismo, 1415.
55. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 97.
56. Rabinbach, Human Motor.
57. Pohl-Valero, Energa, productividad y alimentacin.
58. So asserted a political economy manual that was used to study this science in Colombia in
the 1860s. Petano y Mazariegos, Manual, 110.
59. Sz, El ahorro de energa, Cromos (Bogot), 7 Feb. 1920, p. 33.
60. At that time a slow process of industrialization and urbanization was beginning to take place
in some cities of ColombiaMedelln and Bogotthat would little by little replace the colonial
model of production with modern manufacturing. For scholars such as Santiago Castro-Gmez,
it was not only the implementation of a new form of production that generated policies to
produce modern subjects but also precisely the desire and the virtuality of that industrialization,
which structured the policies and governing of life even prior to the achievement of its material
conditions. Castro-Gmez, Tejidos onricos.
61. Torres Umaa, La nutricin.
62. Carlos Esguerra, quoted in Ministerio de Instruccin Pblica, Repblica de Colombia,
Undcima parte, 149.
63. Torres Umaa, La nutricin, 52.
64. Ibid., 64.
65. For a comparative analysis of the various conceptions held by Mexican and Peruvian doctors
on the issue of the pathology or physiological normalcy of the highland races during this same
period, see Chzaro, La soledad local.
66. Torres Umaa, Cuarta Conferencia, 169.
67. Gonzalo Pars, Energa, Cromos (Bogota), 21 Sept. 1918, p. 161.
27

68. Contract between Ministry of Public Instruction and Rafael Zerda Bayn, Consejo de Estado,
Sala de lo Contencioso Administrativo, 27 Mar. 1917. Zerda Bayn, Qumica, 7, includes a
transcription of the contract but omits the number of copies purchased.
69. Zerda Bayn, Qumica, 15152.
70. Barberi, Manual de higiene, iii.
71. Mission statement of the Pediatric Society of Bogot, 27 May 1918, Archivo General de la
Nacin, Bogot, Repblica, Ministerio de Gobierno, seccin 4ta Personeras Jurdicas, tomo 6,
fol. 151.
72. Castro Carvajal, Caridad y beneficencia.
73. Estatutos del Patronato de Gotas de Leche, Archivo General de la Nacin, Bogot,
Repblica, Ministerio de Gobierno, seccin 4ta Personera Jurdica, tomo 6, fol. 131.
74. Andrade B., Contribucin del estudio, 1011.
75. Jorge Bejarano, Las Gotas de Leche: Su significado y valor social, Cromos (Bogot), 27
Sept. 1919, pp. 18990. Bejarano became later, in the 1940s, one of principal promoters of
nutritional policies in Colombia. In 1941 he published a book on nutrition based on the premise
(as elaborated in the quote from this book cited as an epigraph to this essay) that racial health
depended fundamentally on a good diet, and that the races that take advantage of new
knowledge of nutrition [will have] longer longevity, greater height, more vigor, and higher
culture. Bejarano, Alimentacin y nutricin, 7.
76. For statistical data on this institution between the months of October and November 1933,
see Gota de Leche.
77. According to the report by Calixto Torres Umaa at the Tenth Pan American Health
Conference and the Third Pan American Conference on Eugenics and Homoculture, held jointly
in 1938 in Bogot, Colombia was home to 638 school cafeterias, intended to ensure free food
for malnourished schoolchildren, distributing meals to 100,000 children. Torres Umaa,
Alimentacin, 468.
78. Solano Lozano, Colonia escolar, 34.
79. On the Village Library, see Silva, Repblica Liberal.
80. Nuestros alimentos, 78.
81. Bonilla, Alimentacin defectuosa, 5, 15. Emphasis added. Bonilla defined the sources of
alimentation as all the materials that the body makes use of to build and replace its tissues, to
regulate its functions, to promote its development and its health, and to obtain the energy
necessary to conserve heat and perform work. Ibid., 5.
82. Gamboa Echanda and Pedraza, Higiene integral, 6.
83. Ibid., 51.
84. Ibid., 50.
85. For the history of this French term, and its relationship to and differences from the English
one of eugenics, see Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 5583.
86. Gamboa Echanda and Pedraza, Higiene integral, 4. The first chapter of the book explains
the concept of eugenics and advocates eugenic measures such as sterilization, the fight
28

against miscegenation with inferior races, regulation of immigration, regulation of marriage,
moral and sex education, reeducation of abnormal persons, and measures of social hygiene.
Ibid., 6. However, the bulk of the booklet was devoted to the nutritional component of childcare.
87. Pinard, La puericultura.
88. Vernaza, Higiene escolar, 11.
89. Gartner, Notas sobre puericultura, 11.
90. For details on the eugenics movement in France and its neo-Lamarckian focus, see
Schneider, Quality and Quantity.
91. Salazar Estrada, Mortinatalidad, 8.
92. Stepan, Hour of Eugenics, 17. For Colombia, see Noguera, Medicina y poltica.
93. Torres Umaa, Problemas, 9.
94. Torres Umaa, Cuarta Conferencia, 176, 180.
95. Ibid., 178.
96. Muoz, Estudio introductorio, 16.
98. Bonilla, Alimentacin defectuosa, 1617.
99. Lombana Barreneche, Prevencin del alcoholismo, 804.
100. For discussion on the consumption of chicha at the end of the colonial period, see Alzate
Echeverri, Suciedad y orden, 171201. On the history of chicha and hygiene debates, as well as
campaigns concerning chicha in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Noguera,
Medicina y poltica, 150169; Calvo Isaza and Saade Granados, La ciudad en cuarentena.
102. This does not mean that there was a consensus among nutritionists in this regard. Both
Calixto Torres Umaa and Jorge Bejarano were fierce opponents of this drink, but in all cases
there was an energy-centric and hereditary component to their arguments. For the use of the
expression brutalize in relation to chicha consumption, see Noguera, Medicina y poltica, 158
159.
103. Zerda Bayn, Qumica, 357, 359.
104. Lombana Barreneche, Correspondencia sobre la chicha, 360.
105. Socarrs, Alimentacin de la clase obrera en Bogot, 32.
106. Ibid., 42.
107. Ibid., 35.
108. Eduardo Restrepo has also noted the ambiguity of the notion of race among the Colombian
elites in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, he is not concerned with the
historical meanings of biology and its natural and cultural entanglements. Restrepo, Imgenes
del negro.
109. See Escobar, Encountering Development, 10253.
110. Palacios, La Regeneracin, 277.
111. See, respectively, Chzaro, La soledad local; Vargas Domnguez, La normalidad.;
Roldn, Discursos alrededor.

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