“From the generalization where all false ideas come from”: criminals, scientists and the medical/juridical discourse about delinquency and punishment in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century

Abstract

This article addresses some of the different aspects that gave meaning to the medical/ juridical discussions in Brazil, in the period corresponding to the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the moment when the theoretical-practical elements of a movement with scientific elements based on the Italian Positive School of Criminal Law contrasted with Classical Law that had been practiced until then in the country. For this purpose, we start from a cultural analysis that aims to identify in the process of modernization and urbanization that the city of Porto Alegre, RS went through the favorable environment for the diffusion of the medical-legal science that, under different approaches, sought to identify, systematize, and act upon delinquency and its agents. Different sources are used, among them the criminal cases, considered in this article as the main place in which the articulation between discursive and non-discursive practices is sought, in order to verify that that, through the process of institutionalization of the criminological science of positive character, a wide scheme of scrutiny of the physical and social body in the urban space was implemented.