Legal Medicine, life and infanticide in Mexico (1860-1870)

the conceptions of Luis Hidalgo y Carpio (1818-1879)

Abstract

This article examines the conceptions about life and infanticide of Mexican physician Luis Hidalgo y Carpio, as well as his debates and strategies to try to standardize them among doctors and jurists in the 1860s and 1870s. In order to do so, we analyze his texts published in Gaceta Médica de Méxicoand two manuals of Legal Medicine of his authorship. This shows in what terms some debates, strategies and scientific negotiations have taken place about certain fundamental elements of the organization of theMexican national state. At the turn of the 1860s and 1870s, the works of the two commissions charged with drafting new legal codes for Mexico (Criminal and Civil) was restarted. Hidalgo y Carpio, then a member of the Academia Nacional de Medicinaand professor of Legal Medicine at the Escuela Nacional de Medicina, was invited to join the commission responsible for drafting the Penal Code, which was composed mostly of jurists. Among other duties, the commission had to establish a series of definitions for some offences. Among them were those of abortion and infanticide. The problem, however, was that the definitions of these crimes were directly related to the category of life, which, in turn, was controversial even among the members of the Academia. Withouta consensus on when and how life began, nor the time and conditions for considering the fetus a newborn child, it became difficult to categorize and assign penalties for attacks against it. The determination of the existence of life was also elementary tothe definition of other articles of the Civil Code related to the inheritance and rights of the unborn and newborn. All discussions about life and infanticide take place against a backdrop of anti-French and anticlerical feelings, heightened in Mexico by the Republican Restoration in 1867.