In certain branches higher education has made great strides. Law and Medicine in particular have a staff of eminent men in their colleges. Any man who has made his mark in Europe is sure of a choice audience there, drawn from both professors and students. I had the pleasure of being present at the first of Enrico Ferri's lectures at the Law schools. His subject was Social Justice. The powerful and glowing eloquence of the orator was never displayed before a public better prepared to profit by his lofty teaching on humanitarian equity.
It is not in vain that so many young Argentines have made their way to the universities of France, Italy, and Germany. As soon as I set foot in the hospitals here I had an impression that I was in the full stream of European science, and that the Argentinos were determined to be second to none in the perfection of their organisation.
I noticed an excellent bacteriological institute managed by a compatriot of ours, M. Lignères, and some agricultural schools that are turning out a competent body of men for the development of the Pampas.
The hospitals impressed us very favourably. The New Hospital for Contagious Diseases, situated some kilometres from the centre of the town, comprises a series of model buildings, all strictly isolated, of which each is devoted to a special disease. At the Rivadavia Hospital, for women only, the Cobo wards (for pulmonary tuberculosis and surgical operations) are particularly admirable. Everywhere the latest improvements as regards the appliances for the patients, the sterilising halls, and operating theatres, and also as regards surgical appliances. Nothing has been overlooked that can increase the efficaciousness of the hospital schools: amphitheatres for classes, diagrams, specimens, etc. The laboratories are so luxurious that they would make our own hospital students envious. It was here that Dr. Pozzi, our eminent compatriot, performed in May, 1910, a series of operations, every one of which proved successful; while his German fellow-practitioner, whose scientific acquirements are unquestionable, met with very different results. The same may be said of Dr. Doléris, who held a course of demonstration lessons in Buenos Ayres, and whose operations were also crowned with entire success. The Rivadavia Hospital has a fine annexe of supplementary work: consultations for outpatients, electro- and radio-therapy, dispensary, etc. I must also mention the sumptuous recreation-rooms for the use of convalescents, and the gardens, exquisitely kept.
In the maternity wards (at Alvear as at Rivadavia) we find the same care for ultra-modern comfort, combined with the strictest cleanliness. I must not forget a very curious obstetrical museum with diagrams, anatomical specimens, and a series of admirable preparations exemplifying the different stages of gestation. A small cradle should be noticed (a German invention, I believe), ingeniously attached to the mother's bed and taken down with a single movement of the hand. Very happy instance of simplification. Everywhere—in the design of the buildings, in the fittings, laboratories, sterilising- and operating-rooms—the influence and products of Germany were patent. On the other hand, the French culture of doctors and surgeons, masters and pupils, was easily discernible, and all were greatly indebted to the classics of our Paris and Lyons Faculties. I could not see the evidences of this in the hospital libraries without remembering regretfully the churlish reception that is given in some of our hospital schools to modest foreign savants.
At the same time, I will not conceal the fact that Protection of the most extreme sort flourishes among the Argentine physicians, who are very anxious to defend themselves against European competition. I was told that there are no less than thirty-two examinations imposed on a doctor from the Paris Faculty before he is permitted to write out the simplest prescription for a gaucho of the Pampas. We may be allowed to find these measures highly exaggerated.
There is a splendid Asylum for Aged Men kept by French Sisters of Charity in a condition of the daintiest cleanliness, and managed by ladies of the city. The Argentinos claim that their women are very zealous in all charitable works. Doubt was thrown recently in the Chamber on this statement. I am not competent to judge.
One original institution—the Widows' Asylum—is a sort of settlement composed of small apartments of one or two rooms, on a single floor. In the courtyard opposite the gate is a small shed, in which is placed a stove for open-air cooking, possible in this fortunate climate all the year round. The rents are very low for widows having more than four children.
The lunatic colony of Lujan, to which its founder and manager, Dr. Cabred, has given the significant name of The Open Door, deserves a more detailed description. It consists of an estate of six hundred hectares on the Pacific Line seventy kilometres from Buenos Ayres, and here twelve hundred patients are accommodated in twenty villas—graceful chalets, surrounded by gardens and containing each sixty patients. These villas are fitted up with everything necessary for clinotherapy and balneotherapy, with fine recreation-rooms. The colony is enclosed by a line of wire; not a wall, not a wooden fence—everywhere unrestricted freedom and a wide, open horizon.
We have erected a monument in Paris to the memory of Pinel, in which he is represented as breaking the chains which mediæval ignorance heaped on the mad inmates of Bicêtre as late as 1793. But if you visit our asylum of Sainte-Anne, you are tempted to ask in what this "modern" establishment differs from an ordinary prison. I hasten to add that in the other asylums of the Department of the Seine we are beginning to develop the open-air treatment. Long ago the system of placing certain patients out in the country amongst peasant families was planned and adopted. The Open Door treats all mental patients, of whatever degree of madness, on the plan known out here as "work performed in liberty." In the confusion of cerebral phenomena the widest freedom is given to the reflex action of unconscious or quasi-unconscious life. If a patient has learnt a trade, he finds at once in The Open Door an outlet for his energies, for it is with the labour of the lunatics that the carpentering, masonry, scaffolding, etc., of these villas was executed. Those who have no trade are given a technical education, and often acquire great skill. The difficulty is to persuade the newcomer to begin to work. If he refuses, he is left alone. "He is left to feel dull." Then he is invited to take a walk, and once on the spot where work is proceeding, he is offered a tool that he may do as the others are doing.