Miracle cures: advertisements for various medications in the Santa Fe press, Argentina (1890 -1918)

In the late nineteenth century, as in other regions of Argentina and Latin America, the Santa Fe press featured a growing number of offers of health products such as tonics, pills and syrups. Aimed at a lay audience, these claimed to cure a series of conditions defined as belonging to "modern life." This article analyzes the discursive dimension of the advertisements printed between 1890 and 1918: how they organized meanings associated with these conditions, an issue that is inscribed within a broad line of research aimed at analyzing social representations of health and disease, and how they participated in the different social spheres in the constitution of modern-day Argentina.