Life Stories in Jose Ingenieros

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between Jose Ingenieros's casos and biographical narrative procedures. The casos were derived from medical histories and were published in Criminologia and other books. Biographies were textual models privileged by positivist historians. One thing in common between these casos and biographies is the exemplar and non-anonymous condition of the characters. That phenomenon is closely related to medical professional performance, expanded to other intellectual realms thanks to dominant cientificismo. This situation led doctors to interpret political and social history. Moreover, some physicians' professional biographies could be read in the casos because an autobiographical intention has penetrated the apparently neutral and objective medical discourse.