The concept of the body in 19th century schoolbooks:

A hermeneutic reading

Abstract

This paper begins by asking how the term body was configured in textbooks of the 19th century. Hermeneutics was chosen as the investigative approach to ask about the past -otherness- from the present. Asking about the body is not an anachronistic question, since it touches what is most alive in Mexico today: Hermeneutics is chosen because it invites you to look back from the present, without being clear about what you will find. The work of hermeneutic dialogue with the past helped to understand that textbooks do not contain information, but rather a horizon of meaning that refers to a world. The hermeneu-tic reading allowed us to understand how the notion of the body was changing, since it went from a body based on the beliefs of the Catholic religion to a concept of the body that was governed by the precepts of natural history, physics, and mathematics. The observable, the quantifiable and the measurable became a way of seeing the human body, essentialized and making it a universal concept, determining it from its genitalia and erasing history, experience, and desire. Comparing the body with plants and animals to refer to them at a level of universality has set the standard for pointing out those bodies that from natu-ral logic are amorphous or abnormal, thus gestating discrimination. For this reason, it is important that teachers question the discourses they emit and transmit through school books as discourses with a claim to truth.