THE MUSEUM OF MR. PERFECTO PACIENTE BUSTAMANTE, OR “MAKE A COUNTRY, TAKE ANDEAN HERBS AND FIGHT AGAINST THE DOCTORS”.

The Bustamante House and its “Museum”, in Buenos Aires. Publication of the time.


Perfecto Paciente Bustamante.


The advertisements provided confidence towards their Andean products.


Irina Podgorny

(Quilmes, Argentina, 1963).


Historian of science. She has a doctorate in Natural Sciences (National University of La Plata, Argentina). Principal Investigator of CONICET in the Historical Archive of the Museum of La Plata. Guest Professor at universities and other national and international institutions. President of the Earth Science History Society (2019-2020), since 2021 she is a member of the Council of the History of Science Society (HSS), where she is in charge of its Meetings and Congresses committee.


She is the author of numerous books, this year she published Florentino Ameghino y Hermanos. Empresa argentina de paleontología ilimitada (Edhasa, Buenos Aires, 2021) and Los Argentinos vienen de los peces. Ensayo de filogenia nacional (Beatriz Viterbo, 2021). His articles have been published among other journals in Osiris, Science in Context, Redes, Asclepio, Trabajos de Prehistoria, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, British Journal for the History of Science, Nuncius, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Museum History Journal, Journal of Global History, Revista Hispánica Moderna, etc.


A regular contributor to the Ñ Magazine, she directs the "History of Science" Collection at the Prohistoria de Rosario publishing house, where the Diccionario Histórico de las Ciencias de la Tierra en la Argentina was published in 2016, thanks to a scientific dissemination project of CONICET.


Her publications can be consulted: HERE

By Irina Podgorny (*)

In 1995, Julián Cáceres Freyre published a bio-bibliographical review on the Riojan merchant Perfecto Paciente Bustamente (1870-1932), former owner of a herbalist's shop that, in the 1920s, had two branches in the city of Buenos Aires: one with address on Calle Arenales and the other, located on Avenida Pueyrredón No. 1371, next to the residence of the author's family and where today a subsidiary of the pasta factory "La Juvenil" is located.


Julián Bernardo Cáceres Freyre (1916-1999) combined his childhood memories with his intellectual itinerary, showing how the shadows of a mummy and an herbalist would reappear in his professional life in the second half of the 20th century. Those two figures had marked him, one alive, the other dead, although, to tell the truth, by then, both counted as dead. And seen from this 21st century, all three are already part of the past: Cáceres Freyre passed away more than twenty years ago. Between 1958 and 1980 he had directed the National Institute of Anthropology. He was also director of the National Endowment for the Arts and president of the Bonaerense Institute of Numismatics and Antiquities, in whose Bulletin he published the reference note. (1) In 1959 he carried out anthropological studies in Mexico with a grant from the Organization of American States (OAS) and, ten years later, comparative cultural anthropology between the southwestern United States and northwestern Argentina, thanks to a grant from the Fundación Guggenheim. Undoubtedly, in these matters he will have crossed paths with the works of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) although, in reality, that comparison was an old idea of ​​Juan B. Ambrosetti (1865-1917), the first director of the Ethnographic Museum of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, whose papers he kept thanks to the legacy of his widow.


During his long career as a civil servant, Cáceres Freyre learned that the dead of all ages, in addition to accumulating dust, left behind things, bones and papers. But also that the fragility of Argentine institutions prevented them from being incorporated into its collections. He, for his part, was an outstanding collector not only of writings, books and objects: he knew how to collect minuscule stories about the practice of science at a time parallel to the prominence that these would gain thanks to Menocchio, the 16th century Friulian miller, the figure that articulates the story of Cheese and Worms by Carlo Ginzburg.


Far from microhistory but a lover of details, Cáceres arrived at these minutiae from folklore, a field that confronted him with several unavoidable facts. First, the permeability between the cultured and popular worlds, between the past and the present, that is, the coexistence in the same space or in the same individual and at the same time, of traditions of diverse historical and cultural origins that question the linear vision of the becoming of things. Second, the question of "how a person who had not had university studies (or secondary) could realize what were the different subjects that covered the knowledge of the science of Folklore or popular knowledge, which in those years was only being configured." Unwittingly -or perhaps yes- when reviewing the life of Perfecto Paciente a question was raised that today, when the vocational practices of science and the role of amateurs are under scrutiny, becomes more relevant than ever to understand those spaces where almost no one expects science to happen. Don Perfecto demonstrates that, whether in Chilecito, in the mines of La Rioja or in a herbalist's shop on Avenida Pueyrredón, there can always be someone willing to assume the identity of a knowledge worker. And be successful.


Cáceres Freyre proposed an answer to that question by recalling that, in 1921, the Argentine Folklore Survey had begun to be disseminated: organized by the National Education Council, it was preceded by a booklet with instructions for teachers. Cáceres Freyre pointed out that this allegedly self-taught knowledge – far from spontaneous and popular, far from arising from the genius of individuals – had been modeled or activated by the devices of the State bureaucracy. Although intended for another recipient, they indicated to Perfecto Paciente what to look at, how to order the data for an anonymous and unknown interlocutor but a participant in a common and intelligible space for all.


Cáceres Freyre was also an assiduous visitor to widows and relatives, advising them on what to do with the inheritance of a relative obsessed with hoarding objects on shelves, basements and cupboards. In those spaces, in those visits and thanks to his tours of the provinces, through his father's archive and his interest in the arts, the stories of two vendors of incurable remedies emerged: Perfecto Paciente Bustamante and Guido Bennati whom, with subtlety , was able to recognize as two links in the history of the practice of archeology in Argentina and part of that diffuse network that structures the practice of science, crossing the borders of disciplines and schools of thought.


The House of Bustamante of Andean products


Perfecto Paciente Bustamante was born in Famatina, province of La Rioja, Argentina, in January 1870. Associated with his brother, he settled in Buenos Aires apparently in 1897. They were soon followed by his mother, Ceferina Díaz Moreno, widow of Carmen Bustamante, a former soldier of the Paraguayan War and a traveling merchant from Tinogasta.


Perfecto Paciente preserved several memories of his deceased parents: of his father, a deck of cards from Paraguay, of his mother, an urn consecrated by pain, “his little bones that remain there for me to contemplate and his emaciated skull with a high forehead, to ecstasy, admiring him!”


Perfecto had arrived in Buenos Aires after having worked as a foreman in the Famatina mines and as a teacher and secretary of the justice of the peace in Chilecito, where he trained to hold those positions and acquired the figures of speech used in his books. Probably Sarmiento's Memories of the Province inspired him to concoct the skinny figure of his mother, the Rioja garden and life among the provincial montoneras. Bustamante, whether he knows it or not, sees himself as a Sarmiento of the 20th century, one of the many anonymous sons engendered by the pen of the former president read in the country's school classrooms. Fate, however, would not be so propitious and unlike the writings of the San Juan native, for Bustamante the city and modernity would become anathema, synonymous with the foreign degeneration to which the Argentine people were subjected in the hands of the chemical emporium. , science and medicine laboratories. And of the anarchists, the eponyms of the montoneras of the previous century.


The university and workers' federations and the societies of resistance seemed equally disastrous to him: “crowds of budding men who never cease to ramble in a perennial unusual conspiracy, against the principle of authority. Inexperienced boys, beardless and ignorant youngsters, malignant tumors within the heart of the country”, against which early and rapid surgery was worth it, since “every moment they start, they must be removed as soon as possible, even if they hurt and even if they bleed, because for that there is no possible cure, and they damage and harm in its foundation, the biological action of national life, which must continue to progress.”


Bustamante wrote these lines in the context of the throes of the University Reform of Córdoba, the Bolshevik Revolution and the anti-European crisis unleashed by the Great War, in accordance with and in full expansion of the Argentine Patriotic League, the far-right movement that emerged in the decade previous and linked to the tragic week of 1919. Several scientific figures were linked to it to promote the search for Argentine artisanal and popular traditions. Among them, the Italian naturalized Argentine Clemente Onelli (1864-1924), a traveling naturalist who came to rescue fabrics and crafts from the provinces whose secrets were transmitted to the ladies of the city through courses and exhibitions.


Bustamante, paradoxically, left the Rioja mines to search in Buenos Aires for the remedy against the bite of a hydrophobic dog: the vaccine and anti-rabies treatment, discovered by Louis Pasteur in 1885 and applied only in the capital since the vaccine was not transportable. Bustamante did not leave much evidence of this treatment despite -or perhaps because of- having been definitively cured and dying alone many years later in an attempt to recover his mines and become rich thanks to the exploitation of the native land.


His fight against allopathic doctors would arise shortly after, with his mother's illness admitted to the Hospital de Clínicas in the Capital. The lady who, since she was a child, had been swallowed by the melancholy of misery, had entered the treatment very excited to find herself in a safe place, where -according to her son- she suffered for a month and then asked to be removed due to the lack of shelter and food. . It was at that moment, “that the two brothers agreed to be successful and prosper a business started by me, to bring medicinal herbs from the Andean mountains and offer them for sale in this capital, since they are taking them to Europe and here only foreign-made poisons were known.”



Casa Bustamante had different stores dedicated to Andean products, mining businesses, mineral collection, lodestone and medicinal plants. They were not the only ones: in the town of Moreno, the spiritualist Ana Flores combined her practices with the sale of Andean products and the lodestone. The Avenida Pueyrredón branch, according to the testimony of Cáceres Freyre, had a glass window on each side of the entrance and inside exhibited natural history specimens; fossils, minerals and archaeological, folkloric and historical objects, such as spurs, stirrups, weapons, the father's playing cards and other objects from the Paraguayan War. The vast majority of the pieces -including the maternal bones- came, however, from the province of La Rioja where herbs were supplied and the mines were explored.


The Bustamante Museum - as the business called itself - was the consulting room and office of Mr. Perfecto, who attended personally and, thanks to the museum, was enabled to open every day, even on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. . Among the products stood out the lodestone –of use older than the rue– and the Chuschampi, prodigious balm of resinous herbs for external use against rheumatic pain, sores, fistulas and back pain.



According to the advertisements that Bustamante published in the newspapers and magazines, the store had been founded in 1897, distributed its product catalog free of charge and had a telephone to receive orders with number 44 of the Telephone Union, the company that in 1886 acquired for several decades dominance of the telecommunications business in Buenos Aires and the Pampas region.


Cáceres Freyre summarized some of Don Perfecto's works: the one that interested him the most, for collecting tales and figures from Rioja folklore, was Girones de historia (1922). He left aside, "due to excess of fantasy", those linked to Andean products and their industry of medicinal herbs that, in reality, defined the reason for his collection: the Argentine Catechism of long life (1923) and La Flora Argentina (1922), a “defense of public health. nationalist naturalism. defense of the race. New Horizons. Economics and sociology. Light for everyone!!!” These books of about 160 pages, illustrated with photos and engravings, published under the seal of his house, with the condor as a flag build a bridge that leads from archeology to the history of the practices of botany, commerce, politics, medicine and, also, to that of conservative thought linked to the safe values ​​of the past of the national soil.


Books from home, their reading made unnecessary (except to extirpate anarchists) all the surgical tools invented up to now, as well as rays and plates, the solemnity of auscultation and all the "specialists" with their pathological techniques. Dedicated to the Sovereign People of the Republic, it sought to combat speculation that prevented the use of national flora to keep up “the lucrative market of foreign drugs and deadly injections that has been degenerating our race with the annihilation of the blood of its victims. ” Europe forced us to consume these harmful materials, poisoning us while "Here nothing is lacking for the life of the inhabitants, we are enough for ourselves!" with nature and Pachamama.



Today, that speech would be branded as a proclamation of health sovereignty, forgetting that understanding Nature as God's great pharmacy is an idea of the European alchemists of the High Middle Ages and that naturalistic self-help manuals based on products of the earth were another invention of the northern hemisphere. Not for nothing, Jorge Luis Borges, referring to literature, in 1932 would recall that "The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult that nationalists should reject as foreign." (2).



Notes:

1. Julián Cáceres Freyre: Bio-bibliografía de Perfecto Paciente Bustamante (1860-1932). Escritor, coleccionista y precursor del Folklore en la provincia de La Rioja. En Boletín del Instituto Bonaerense de Numismática y Antigüedades, 18: 47-66, 1995.

2  Jorge Luis Borges. El escritor argentino y la tradición. En Obras Completas, 1. Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1990, (1a ed. 1932).


* Irina Podgorny

La Plata Museum

https://arqueologialapplata.academia.edu/IrinaPodgorny

Special for Hilario. Arts Letters Crafts


Subscribe to our newsletter to be updated.

Check our Newsletters