Scientific Experimentation in Peru’s Manicomio del Cercado and Larco Herrera Psychiatric Hospitals

This paper investigates the changing nature of scientific experimentation on mental health patients confined in two Peruvian psychiatric facilities. The first, Lima's Manicomio del Cercado, functioned as a traditional space of confinement in the center of the city throughout much of the nineteenth century. In 1918, authorities replaced it with the Larco Herrera Psychiatric Hospital, a spacious, modern hospital located outside of the city and modeled after French institutions. In the decades that followed, officials and Lima's press hailed Larco Herrera as a symbol of progress and modernity, and as a site where the mentally ill would be treated more humanely. They also celebrated it as a site for new research and experimentation carried out by such luminaries as Honorio Delgado and Carlos Gutiérrez-Noriega, who were granted fairly unrestricted access to patients there as well as to criminals in Lima's prisons. Using these populations as research subjects, Delgado, Gutiérrez-Noriega, and others made important discoveries in, among other things, the treatment of brain swelling due to advanced syphilis infection and the effects of cocaine and coca on physical and mental health. In doing so, they would contribute to Peruvian psychiatry's development as a distinct and highly respected medical-scientific tradition within Latin America. This paper attempts to rethink their research practices, and the development of modern Peruvian psychiatry more broadly, by situating their work at Larco Herrera within a longer tradition of access to and experimentation on bodies in the Manicomio del Cercado as well as Lima's prisons. In this way, it seeks to explore how the earlier traditions and practices of discipline and control in Peru's institutions of confinement may have shaped "modern" psychiatric research and patient experiences.