The device of gymnastics in the context of nineteenth-century spanish social medicine. From hygiene policies to the foundational discourses of “physical education”

© 2017 CSIC. In the first half of the c.19, hygienic and therapeutic gymnastic techniques were established throughout Europe as a device of knowledge/power concerning care and control over the body that, on the one hand, allowed the development of professional medical exploitation and, on the other, served as a justification for implementing and legitimising physical education in schools. Through a process of the localising, selecting and interpreting of documents, the object of this paper is to identify the genealogy of such a device within the Spanish context. To this end, particular attention has been placed on the technical manifestations perceptible in both the conflicts and discourses on which this new professional space was constructed. Emphasis has been given to the constitutive doctrinal texture of gymnastics, whose mark–in terms of regularity, stability, moral and physical self-restraint–would be present in the foundational justifications of physical education in schools.