Nancy Scheper-Hughes on Torture and the Medically Disappeared in Argentina

Nancy Scheper-Hughes: "The Ghosts of Montes de Oca: Naked Life, Torture and the Medically Disappeared"

Between 1976 and 1991, 1400 patients at Montes de Oca, Argentina's national mental asylum for the profoundly "mentally deficient," disappeared. Another 1350 died, many inexplicably. Cecilia Giubileo, a young psychiatrist who planned to expose the institutional abuses related to the disappearances and deaths, was among the disappeared. Nancy Scheper-Hughes will discuss the asylum's recent history and address the question of how medical personnel entrusted with the care of the most vulnerable patients could justify a regime of malignant abuse in one of the most psychiatrically sophisticated countries in the world.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is best known for her award-winning books Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland and Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. She was given the Berkeley William Sloane Coffin Jr. Award for moral leadership on April 4, 2007.

Wednesday, April 11, 4:00 pm
CLAS Conference Room, 2334 Bowditch Street