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5
Of Tuberculosis and Trajectories |
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TB is a disease of time; it speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it.
(Sontag 1977, 14) |
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The further away one stands from the disease of tuberculosis, the more it appears to be a single, uniform phenomenon. It is associated with one of the great philosophical breakthroughs in medicineKoch developed his ''postulates'' for defining disease agency partly with tuberculosis in mind. Indeed, he could hardly avoid it since epidemiologists assure us that at the time he wrote them in 1881, one seventh of all reported human deaths and one-third of deaths of "productive middle-age" groups were attributable to tuberculosis (Brock 1988, 117, 179180). Yet this single disease, a holocaust of those in their prime, has historically proved an elusive thing to classify. The work of classification has involved at many levels a complex ecology of localization, standardization, and time. |
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As this story proceeds, the interweaving of myth, biography, science, medicine, and bureaucracy becomes ever thicker, eluding attempts at standardization and localization from every angle. Just for this reason, though, the story of tuberculosis holds some profound insights about how those threads intertwine, tense against each other, and form the texture of a landscape of time. As the field of science and technology studies has moved to crisscross nature, culture, and discourse in a seamless web (Latour 1993), we would add here a fourth strand: infrastructure, in the form of classification and bureaucracy (Star and Ruhleder 1996). We do this by borrowing some tools from medical sociology: notions of body-biography-trajectory (Corbin and Strauss 1988, 1991) and the temporal lessons of chronic illness (Charmaz |
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