Fellows Report on Fellowship
An Open Door to Madness
By Matilde Sánchez
Matilde Sánchez
Open Door used to be a traditional hospital for the mentally ill with a well-established medical reputation. Located in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this venerable state-run asylum was founded in the mid-1920s to house patients in a friendly environment. True to its name, Open Door favored contact with nature over physical restraint and the straightjacket. Its turn-of-the-century buildings and patients’ wards were a reflection of scientific optimism and Argentina’s former prosperity. However, as military regimes took power in the country and prosperity gradually faded away, Open Door turned into one of the most overcrowded and forgotten human depots, housing thousands of aging madmen and offering living conditions worse than poverty level.
In the 1980s, a macabre story made the front pages of the national papers in Argentina. A dozen mysterious deaths at Open Door led to the discovery of a horror plot going on behind its walls, involving blood and organ traffic. Open Door was investigated, and its superintendent—in an unintentional parody of the scientific genius who goes nuts—ended up in jail.
The Open Door story was one of my first assignments as a journalist for a weekly magazine, and its drama and dark undertones stayed on my mind all these years. Last year I decided to turn that true story into a fictional thriller that would follow the rise and fall of a major medical institution as it goes through a scandal more suitable to a horror tale. Since I wanted the novel to be highly realistic, I began to study the period’s psychiatric trends and milieu. Besides a couple of good books dealing with the history of Argentine medical institutions in the early 20th century, there is virtually no recent bibliography on the general history of psychiatry available in my country. Nor have any of the well-regarded general histories of psychiatry been translated or brought to Argentine libraries. Finding the right historians in this particular field would have taken months of search.
The Knight-Wallace Fellowship meant not only the chance to spend extended time in the most extraordinary libraries of the University of Michigan, where I am found every morning, but also it brought an enlightening dialogue with several outstanding scholars in the history of medicine. Joel Howell opened my eyes to how relevant the system and manner of medical protocols are to understanding scientific discourse on madness and therefore the relationship between patient and doctor. Joel Braslow’s research on Californian asylums took me to the heart of somatic treatments extensively used in Argentina, ranging from bath therapy to electroshock, while Jonathan Metzl, who has written on the marketing techniques behind widely used drugs such as Valium and Prozac, helped me understand medical labeling of the mentally ill.
But above all, it has been my meetings with Saulo Ribeiro, a Brazilian psychiatrist based at the University’s Depression Center, and his guidance—encompassing both scientific knowledge and a wealth of literary and philosophical references underlying medical attitudes—that have steered my readings in the maze of essays and psychiatric textbooks. He has also become a friend I hope to keep for the future. By the time my Fellowship ends, my time in Ann Arbor will have allowed me to build an accurate background for my narrative and will have provided me with intellectual tools not easily available in my country.
Matilde Sánchez is an editor at Ñ, the culture magazine of Clarin (Buenos Aires). She is the author of three novels and a narrative in collaboration with Hebe de Bonafini, head of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Photo by Vince Patton
