This book examines the lives of people caught in the dynamics of changing mores, rapid urbanization, and real public health issues in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Modernity in the Flesh shows the costs Argentines paid for the establishment of liberal democracy between 1880 and 1910. Modernity raised consciousness of the public good and a commitment to new sciences and a new set of priorities that asserted the precedence of health and security of the social whole. This book shows the ways that the tensions of liberal democracy between individual rights and the social good were tempered by "flesh" and articulated through this word. As the state was pursuing positivist science and government, the flesh held out a type of corrective to the focus on scientific and material progress.