Rodriguez analyzes the powerful alliance between medicine, science, and the state in Argentina between 1880 and 1914, resulting in a political culture based on a medical model of defining social problems such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through programs of social hygiene. She argues that these policies led to the destruction of Argentina's early liberal progress and opened the way to the antidemocratic regimes that came later in the twentieth century.