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"Lunger," screams the outlaw at Doc Holliday, "come out and fight. Prepare to die." Holliday, one of the most famous of tuberculosis patients, has appeared twice on the big screen in the Hollywood films ''Tombstone'' and "Wyatt Earp." In both, his pale face, glistening with sweat, is used as a counterpoint to his devil-may-care lifestyle and his gun-happy camaraderie with the Earps. The six years he spent in a sanatorium at the end of his life in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, go unexplored. His tombstone there reads, "He died in bed." As a final irony in the story of romancing disease, localization, and macho myth, another stone reads, "Here lies Doc Holliday whose body is buried somewhere in this cemetery." It seems the body was hidden from potential revenge seekers after he died; its exact whereabouts was then lost in the records (see figures 5.1a and 5.1b). |
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1991). We seek here to recenter the ways in which time and infrastructure interact with biography. The texture of this web is crisscrossed with great divides between these features, so much so that in literature and popular myth the whole terrain has taken on a phantasmagoric shape. Popular images of tuberculosis are often surreal, distorted; and those images are unrecognizable to those undergoing the experience. We have heard echoes throughout this research of the ways it is for those living with and researching AIDS (Epstein 1996). We hope here to add to that rich analysis of experience, activism, and research currently taking shape. |
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Classification and Biography |
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As researchers attempt to decode the human genome, an obvious question has been posed: whose body is it anyway that is getting analyzed? This question is as old as the development of statistics (Hacking 1990); Quetelet sought for the "ideal type" in a statistical analysis of a regiment of Scottish soldiers. With tuberculosis, the body is constantly in motion and the disease is constantly in motion. An ideal type is difficult to conjure. The disease may be localized or spread throughout the body. The state or general condition of the body and of the person's life both enter into the treatment regime, which may take months and historically has often taken years, sometimes a lifetime. |
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