Summary
Published November 2016.
This chapter combines historical and anthropological inquiry. The authors analyze the tensions around the treatable and untreatable, the emergent and the chronic, in two distinct time frames, conceptualized as historical and ethnographic case studies. The first period concerns the decline and disappearance of tuberculosis (TB) from Western countries in the first half of the twentieth century, whereas the second period touches on the reappearance of TB in the wake of HIV/AIDS, multi-resistance, and globalization at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Both sections interrogate the narratives of revolution and stagnation and of exciting acuteness and boring routine, which the authors regard as significant for the relation between tuberculosis and its treatments, as well as for the ways a disease, its biomedical treatments, and public health approaches are defined, problematized, and understood in medicine and society.
