Tango impressions with medical overtones

Abstract

Tango and the milonga are more than music or dance genres. They reflect a social phenomenon, traditionally embracing emotions, everyday life, culture, poetry, satire, and human concerns. The medical field, with its diverse domains, was no exception in providing a source of inspiration to tango composers, whose published scores were consistently adorned with humorous artwork on their cover. Humor aside, there were some serious medical matters that plagued Argentinian society at the turn of the twentieth century. Topics that recur in tangos are tuberculosis, syphilis, and mental illness. It appears that the human mind has an inherent ability to tackle the most serious problems in witty ways or, as Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish master of neurohistology, theorized, when humans abandon habitual seriousness and resort to play, mental life becomes integrated and full, and all cerebral systems get their turn in the game. This article presents a selection of “biomedical” tangos. One might be tempted to construct neologisms such as tangoanatomy, tangopathology, tangopsychiatry, and tangopharmacology.